Cocoa data
The numbers behind the rest of the site: what cocoa has cost, who grows it and who buys it, drawn from public sources and traceable to the file each came from.
Cocoa price history, 1960 to 2026
The world price for every one of 801 months, in the dollars of the day and in constant ones. The latest month is US$5,920 a tonne; the record is US$10,750, set in January 2025.
Cocoa production by country, 1961 to 2024
All 57 producing countries in one table, with each figure’s status. Côte d'Ivoire grew 36% of a world crop of 5.23 million tonnes in 2024, and four countries grew 66%.
Cocoa trade: who exports and who imports
Net exports and imports for every country, as printed in the annexes of the International Cocoa Agreement, 2026, with the arithmetic of who has to join before it binds anyone.
What legally counts as chocolate
The minimum cocoa, cocoa butter and milk the law requires in nine jurisdictions, each figure beside the clause it was read in.
How cocoa and chocolate are tested
Seventeen methods, from the cut test to DNA and isotope analysis: what each measures, a published use of it, and what a result does not establish.
Allergen labelling rules for chocolate
Which allergens the law requires on a label in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, and why “may contain” is voluntary in all of them.
Chocolate factory hygiene
Why a dry food is cleaned without water, what a clean test result does not show, and five outbreaks that explain the rules.
Chocolate packaging
What a wrapper protects against, what migrates from inks, board and jute, how food-contact materials are regulated, and what “recyclable” and “compostable” may legally mean.
Chocolate shelf life, storage and shipping
Why there is no single shelf life: the factors measured to shorten or lengthen it, from cocoa beans in a container to a praline in the post.
Cadmium in cacao and chocolate
Every cadmium limit beside its product category, the three reference intakes in their own units, and what soil, tree, fermentation and cocoa percentage each change.
Contaminants in cocoa and chocolate
Lead, nickel, ochratoxin A, aflatoxins, PAHs, acrylamide, pesticide residues and mineral oil: where each enters, what the law says, and what the studies do not show.
Cocoa sustainability: promise and outcome
Child labour, income, prices, certification, deforestation and traceability: what was promised, what was put in place, what was measured, and how good the evidence is.
Cacao and climate
Whether cocoa will disappear by 2050, what the suitability models project and where they disagree, and what drought, heat and heavy rain have been measured doing.
Cacao threat atlas
Dated first records of the major cacao diseases and pests from 1817 to 2021, the official distribution of each with its date, and what has been measured about losses and control.
Cacao by-products
Every proposed use of pod husk, pulp and bean shell, sorted by evidence: established, pilot, laboratory research, or only claimed.
Chocolate machinery
Roasters, refiners, conches, presses, tempering machines, cooling tunnels and enrobers: what each is for, how its inventors described it, and what studies measured it doing.
Chocolate technology in patents and records
Twenty-four patents read in their own text, the famous dates no primary source was found for, two merger decisions and where cocoa is ground.
How much chocolate people eat
Intake, purchases, supply and production are four different quantities. Here they are side by side, with UK household purchases charted from 1992 and the reason country league tables mislead.
Cocoa futures and the world price
The London and New York contracts side by side: what cocoa is deliverable, how each exchange groups and prices origins, where it is delivered, and how the quoted world price is calculated.
Cocoa tariffs and supply-chain law
Import duties on beans, paste, butter, powder and chocolate in four markets, read in the official schedules, and what the EU’s forced labour regulation and due diligence directive say.
What is in chocolate bars
Sugar, fat, stated cocoa percentage and listed ingredients for dark, milk and white tablets on sale in the UK, from an open product database, with the sample’s limits first and the table to filter or download.
Chocolate prices in the shops
How far consumer prices of chocolate have risen in the EU and each member state since January 2023, beside the cocoa price and food in general.
Chocolate health claims and marketing rules
The one authorised cocoa flavanol claim, what sugar-free and high protein must mean, and the UK rules on placing, promoting and advertising chocolate.
How cocoa quality and flavour are assessed
The international protocol, step by step: sampling, the cut test, standard roasts, panel rules, the 0 to 10 scale and the off-flavours that count as defects.
Fermenting small batches of cocoa
Why fermentation normally needs about 50 kg, and the cooler, mesh-bag and single-pod methods researchers use for less, each with its weakness.
The ten genetic groups of cacao
What replaced Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario: the ten groups a 2008 study of 1,241 trees proposed, the clone series behind five of them, and what the papers do not say.
The cocoa atlas
Every country that grows, exports or imports cocoa, grouped by what the figures show it does: grows and exports, grows and still imports, or imports only.
How a number gets onto this site
- It is retrieved, not remembered. The publisher’s file is downloaded and its checksum recorded. Nothing here was typed in from memory or copied from another site’s chart.
- Its licence permits republishing it. The price and production datasets are under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and can be downloaded. The trade tables are shown as a treaty prints them and are not offered for download. A dataset that is paywalled or licence-restricted is not approximated; it is listed below.
- The cocoa rows are kept as retrieved. The charts are built from those rows by one script, and a test fails if the two ever disagree.
- Every change is written down. A unit conversion, a dropped aggregate, a rounding: each is listed on the page that uses the dataset.
- Anything we calculated is labelled as ours. A share, a rank or an average by decade is not the publisher’s statistic and is never presented as one.
- A missing figure stays missing. No gap is filled, smoothed or interpolated. Where a country reported nothing, the table says so.
The datasets
World cocoa price, monthly and annual, 1960 to 2026
- Publisher
- World Bank — World Bank Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet)
- Release
- 2 October 2026, retrieved 8 October 2026
- Licence
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- Updated
- Monthly, on about the second working day. Next check here: 3 November 2026.
Cocoa bean production, area harvested and yield by country, 1961 to 2024
- Publisher
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) — FAOSTAT: Crops and livestock products
- Release
- 23 December 2025, retrieved 8 October 2026
- Licence
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- Updated
- Annually, usually in December. Next check here: 15 January 2027.
952 cacao clones and the genetic group each belongs to
- Publisher
- Motamayor and colleagues, in PLoS ONE — Table S3, 'List of the 952 retained clones', supplementary to Motamayor et al. 2008, PLoS ONE 3(10): e3311
- Release
- 1 October 2008, retrieved 8 October 2026
- Licence
- Creative Commons Public Domain declaration (as stated in the article)
- Updated
- None. Recheck only that the file is still published. Next check here: 8 October 2027.
UK household purchases of chocolate bars and confectionery, 1992 to 2024-25
- Publisher
- Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs — Family Food datasets: UK household purchases and UK household expenditure
- Release
- 17 September 2026, retrieved 9 October 2026
- Licence
- Open Government Licence v3.0
- Updated
- Annual. Next check here: 1 October 2027.
Chocolate tablets listed as sold in the United Kingdom: a sample of labels
- Publisher
- Open Food Facts — Open Food Facts product database, records categorised as dark, milk or white chocolates
- Release
- 9 October 2026, retrieved 9 October 2026
- Licence
- Open Database Licence (ODbL) v1.0
- Updated
- Re-extracted when a further market is added, by the same rule. Next check here: 1 April 2027.
Chocolate tablets listed as sold in Germany: a sample of labels
- Publisher
- Open Food Facts — Open Food Facts product database, records categorised as dark, milk or white chocolates
- Release
- 9 October 2026, retrieved 9 October 2026
- Licence
- Open Database Licence (ODbL) v1.0
- Updated
- Re-extracted when a further market is added, by the same rule. Next check here: 1 April 2027.
Consumer prices of chocolate and cocoa products in the European Union, monthly
- Publisher
- Eurostat — Harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP), ECOICOP version 2, monthly indices (prc_hicp_minr)
- Release
- 2 October 2026, retrieved 9 October 2026
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Updated
- Monthly. Next check here: 20 November 2026.
Chocolate's share of household spending in the European Union, by country and year
- Publisher
- Eurostat — Harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP), ECOICOP version 2, item weights (prc_hicp_iw)
- Release
- 17 September 2026, retrieved 9 October 2026
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Updated
- Annual, with the January index. Next check here: 1 March 2027.
What is not here, and why
The most-quoted cocoa statistics are the International Cocoa Organization’s: production by crop year, grindings, end-of-season stocks and the ratio of stocks to grindings. They are published in a subscription bulletin and are not reproduced on this site. Where a page quotes one, it quotes a figure the organisation has itself made public and names the release. That is why there is no grindings or stocks series here yet, and why cocoa supply and stocks describes the balance in dated prose rather than as a chart.
The exception is cocoa trade, where the 2026 agreement itself prints the figures in its annexes. Those tables are shown as the treaty gives them and are not offered as a download. A trade time series, farm-gate prices and retail prices are not here: each is being assessed for a source that is both authoritative and free to republish, and none will be added on the strength of a secondary chart.