Inflation has calmed down somewhat from its peak of over 10% in recent months, however prices continue to climb in the world of chocolate.
If you’re reading this, it won’t have escaped your attention that the price of our tasty chilli chocolate bars has gone up this year. You’ll also have observed the same in the supermarket aisles.
The graph above shows a historic average price of about $2,500 per kilo. Recently we have seen highs of over $10,500 per kilo!
There are a few key global factors that have brought about the astonishing rise in prices that we have seen of late…
Supply challenges
West Africa is responsible for the vast majority of global cocoa supply, however for 3 consecutive crop cycles in a row now, yield has been declining.
This is due to a multitude of factors – ageing cocoa farmers who aren’t being replaced, ageing cocoa trees that aren’t been replanted, and last but not least, disease often caused by the changing weather effects of global warming.
Financial speculation
Where traders smell blood in the water, they will flock. And the volatility that has been observed recently has led to literally billions of dollars’ worth of speculation (betting) on continued price rises. This causes further “artificial” increase in prices over and above that brought about by the actual supply issues themselves.
“Big Chocolate” companies like Cadbury and Mars use other methods to tackle increasing cocoa prices besides putting up the cost of a bar – they shave a little off their moulds to reduce the size of each bite, they reduce the overall weight of a bar by a few grams here and there, or worse they use more additives – sugars, palm or vegetable oils to name a few, to bulk out bars without adding any extra cocoa.
At SDCF we don’t employ these methods. We can proudly say we don’t use any artificial ingredients in our chocolate bars – no bulking agents.
We want to continue to use only the finest quality chocolate, tempered and poured by hand on our farm in small batches using our UK chilli powder.
And so, we will continue to do our best to keep our prices competitive by keeping tight control of all our other costs where we can. This continues to be a challenge as we are now buying chocolate at more than double the historic price; unfortunately, we cannot absorb all of the cost increases we are seeing and still continue to operate. Hence, we are forced from time to time to apply a price rise to our chocolate bars.
It seems that going forward chocolate will return to being somewhat of a luxury, craft item, as indeed it has been in the past; rather than a cheap, highly processed convenience food – which we think is a good thing!