Why chocolate got more expensive

Cacao swollen shoot virus has caused sustained losses in West Africa, where most of the world's cacao grows, and there is no treatment once a tree is infected. Black pod disease pressure rises with humidity and rainfall.

Much of the West African tree stock is ageing and past peak productivity. Replanting takes years to bear, so the supply response to a price rise is measured in seasons rather than months.

Weather disruption has compounded both. And because cacao is a perennial tree crop grown overwhelmingly by smallholders, none of these can be answered quickly by planting more.

This is the part that makes cocoa different from wheat, and it is the reason a shortage in cocoa is measured in years rather than in months.

A cacao tree planted in response to a high price bears its first meaningful crop several years later and reaches full yield later still. So the supply response arrives long after the price that called for it, frequently into a market that has already rebalanced — which is how tree crops produce boom-and-bust cycles rather than smooth adjustments.

In the meantime the only available responses are better care of existing trees, more intensive harvesting of what is there, and drawing down stocks. All three are limited, and stocks in particular were already thin when the shortage began.

The crop is also grown overwhelmingly by smallholders on small plots, frequently without the cash reserves to buy fungicide or hire labour after a poor season. A price rise that arrives after a bad harvest arrives at the moment the household can least act on it.

Both are moving stories with dates attached, so they live in the current-developments section rather than here.

THE PRICE went to a historic high through 2024 and retreated substantially across 2025 and 2026, with a sharp rebound in mid-2026 on flooding in the two largest producing countries. The cocoa price cycle record carries the current reading and says plainly what would make it wrong.

THE BAR changed in four distinct ways — price, pack size, recipe and product architecture — and only one of those is what people mean by shrinkflation. The record on why your chocolate bar changed separates them, and explains how to read a wrapper to tell which one happened to a product you liked.

The gap between mass-market and craft chocolate narrows in relative terms during a commodity spike, because craft makers were already paying multiples of the commodity price and are less exposed to its movement. It widens again on the way down, for the same reason.

For baking, the advice is unchanged and was never affected: good supermarket dark chocolate is the right choice, because what a brownie needs from chocolate is cocoa solids and cocoa butter rather than nuance that the oven will destroy.

For eating, a single good bar bought less often is a better response to a price rise than a cheaper bar bought as usual — the cheap end is where the formulation compromises land first, and they land in the ingredients list where you can see them.

Reading that list is worth more than it was five years ago. Sugar moving ahead of cocoa mass, a vegetable fat appearing, a cocoa solids declaration dropping by a few points: these are the compromises, and every one of them is disclosed.