We will be closed from December 23rd - January 1st. Of course you can always put orders in but there won't be any delivery or pickup until the second of January. Happy Holidays Everyone!
We will be closed from December 23rd - January 1st. Of course you can always put orders in but there won't be any delivery or pickup until the second of January. Happy Holidays Everyone!
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chocolate, fair trade, climate change
December 8, 2024 Alys Myers

Why Are Chocolate Prices So High?

The price of the cacao bean has more than doubled this year. Why? Well, there's crop disease, El Niño, farm gate prices, market speculation, global supply shortage (mostly due to climate change), chronic underinvestment in cocoa farms, and the fact that problems are still hitting the industry so that the price issues may very well get a bit worse before they get better.
We have put a temporary hold on purchasing cacao nibs as when we went to buy new stock the price had jumped from $5.89 lb to $27.89 lb and that's wholesale! 
Cocoa is a market where the farmers produce a very high quality, high value level of product but receive a very low share of the profit chain. Each year, I have been asking people not to buy cheap chocolate at Halloween as the product is picked by mostly children in African countries where they are paid very poorly, so as the public can buy very cheap chocolate, and often not the best quality once it's watered down by the big companies who want to make more of a profit. I was passing on this information for ethical reasons, not realizing that it would also lead to a shortage of future chocolate period.
It does look like some pressure might be relieved by the end of 2025 but in the meantime the rising prices of chocolate have meant that demand has gone down and the biggest chocolate producers have announced some layoffs.
I toured the Equal Exchange coffee production warehouse this past Thursday and talked to the people who work there about their mission of bringing fair trade products to consumers who care about the fairness of the supply chain. They cut out a lot of the middle companies who all take a cut to bring more money to the farmers without having to raise costs to the consumers. We currently buy chocolate chips, baking cacao, pecans, mango, organic almonds, organic tamari almonds, and mind, body & soul coffee from Equal Exchange. We also buy organic cashews (salted and unsalted), organic prunes, organic apple juice sweetened cranberries, and organic black mission figs fair trade products from Tierra Farms in upper state NY.
This is important to us and we will continue to add items to this list in the future.
Many companies are now looking into chocolate alternatives. Watch this space....
Filed in: chocolate, climate change, prices
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