Droughts, floods, and mismanagement broke the cocoa supply
Columnist Christopher Mims says his preferred dark chocolate now runs roughly double its pre-pandemic price.
WSJ What's News · The AI Trade Gets SpookyHalloween candy prices are up more than 70 percent in the past five years. For chocolate candy, columnist Christopher Mims says the pressure comes from cocoa that has become expensive.
Mims noticed it on a trip to the grocery store, saying his "favorite dark chocolate bars cost about twice what they did before the pandemic." After seeing the price, he looked into the cause. He reports that cocoa prices have stayed high for a while. Mims says "due to extreme weather, cocoa prices are through the roof."
He describes the shortage as coming from two factors. Mims says one cause "is climate change and severe weather." In Africa, where cocoa trees grow, he says "a series of droughts and floods have wiped out a lot of the crop."
The other factor, in his words, is "years of mismanagement, mostly by the governments of the countries where cocoa trees grow." That has left many subsistence farmers who "can't make enough money to improve their growing practices and expand the crop."
That squeeze is what Mims saw in his own grocery bill, and it is showing up in Halloween aisles where candy prices are up more than 70 percent in five years.
Questions people ask
Why does so much cocoa come from Africa?
Cocoa trees need steady heat, humidity, and rain, which West Africa offers across large areas. Generations of small farms there have grown cocoa as a cash crop, so the region now accounts for most of the harvest.
Will candy get cheaper again?
Prices can ease after a good harvest, but damaged farms recover slowly. New cocoa trees take several years to produce pods, and farmers without savings cannot quickly replant or expand, so high retail prices tend to linger.
What are the lab-grown alternatives?
Mims says in the future we could have a world where premium chocolate may come from lab-grown cocoa cells processed into bio-identical chocolate. He says cheaper substitutes, like roasted grape seeds made to taste like chocolate, could be used in candy or cookies.