Rise in global cocoa prices a bitter reality for local chocolatiers this Easter

Easter is just around the corner and local chocolatiers say a global shortage of cocoa beans has been putting pressure on their businesses and makes it hard to keep prices steady for their customers.

Ted Drew-Smith, president of Reids Chocolate and Nut Shop in Cambridge, says his store buys its chocolate already processed from a third-party company that directly purchases and works with the raw cocoa bean. 

Drew-Smith said they have seen a steady increase in the price of chocolate since the start of the pandemic.

"The price of chocolate has gone up by 40 per cent since November and doubled since last year," he told CBC News.

"We contract our chocolate prices a year in advance, so this year our chocolate prices have gone up by 27 per cent, which is not bad considering, but it's going to continue to go up."

Alejandro Marangoni, a professor and Canada Research Chair in the department of food science at the University of Guelph, says the price of chocolate has fluctuated over the decades.

The majority of the world gets their cocoa beans from areas in West Africa, but extreme weather and climate change in those regions has made it difficult for the crop to be successful in recent years, causing a shortage of the raw material. 

"There has been a lot of failure of crops. The trees have not been doing very well with the increase in droughts or floods and increased temperatures, the production seems to be going down," Marangoni said.

"Year after year, the supplies are becoming tighter and tighter and in the last year or so, they have begun exploding. It's interesting because people are talking about 500 per cent increases in the price of cocoa beans for the next year,"

He added demand of chocolate and chocolate products around the world is not going down either, which only adds pressure to the market.

Like Drew-Smith, Esta Chocolates in Kitchener has seen a steady incline in the price of chocolate, particularly in the last year. Busra Hacioglu says her family's store saw prices quadruple last year. 

Hacioglu said they, too, get the chocolate already processed from a third-party company that gets the raw material. She said any time there's a price increase, those costs trickle down the supply chain to the businesses and eventually the customers. 

She adds there are other factors as well that add pressure on businesses.

"It's pressure on the raw material end for us, but also pressure on packaging and other aspects of doing business, like transportation, all that stuff is also rising in tangent with this," she said.