The cost of chocolate is soaring, but blaming cocoa prices doesn’t give the whole picture |
Familiar bars of chocolate have been getting more expensive, and often smaller. Is this really just because cocoa has become more expensive, as is often claimed in the media?
In the UK, a Cadbury Dairy Milk “family” bar has shrunk from 200g to 180g since 2021. In the same period, the price has risen from £1.86 to about £2.75, a price increase of around 65% once you account for the smaller size. Over the same period, overall consumer prices have risen by around 21%.
Much of the media coverage of these changes points in the same direction: higher cocoa prices, often linked to climate change and disease damaging cocoa harvests, particularly in West Africa. One recent article about Maltesers (made by Mars) described increases as the “direct result” of wholesale cocoa prices.
Cocoa prices have indeed risen sharply in recent years. But on their own, they do not fully explain why the prices of chocolate products have risen so much, nor why they remain high even as cocoa prices have eased from their peak.
Before the recent spike, international cocoa prices had been trading for several years at around US$2,400 to US$2,600........