Why Chocolate Is Getting More Expensive and What’s Really Happening in the Cocoa World
I have on obsession with chocolate. I eat way more of it than I should, but I honestly just crave it more than most other foods. It didn’t start out that way, when I was a kid I didn’t have a sweet tooth and would skip dessert every time. Something switched in my brain and now I just want to eat chocolate every day.
Chocolate melts at body temperature, softens at the slightest warmth, and reminds us that life still has corners of it carved for pleasure. But lately, that simple pleasure of mine has begun to feel a little lighter than it used to be, pricier, and oddly thinner.
Now the price thing I didn’t think twice about because what hasn’t gone up in price over the past five years? What caught my eye first was that chocolate bars seemed to be shrinking quietly as the prices creeped upward. Recipes shifted in ways my tongue couldn’t quite explain but instinctively noticed, like wine with a slightly off note on the finish.
Turns out, it wasn’t my imagination (sadly).
The chocolate world is in the middle of a storm, one brewed from weather that has forgotten its patterns, exhausted soil drained of nutrients, from sickened cocoa trees, from global demand that never slows, and from supply chains stretched thin enough for light to leak through.
This is the story of why chocolate prices are rising, why bars are shrinking, why some brands are sweating, and why the future of cocoa, the very seed of indulgence, hangs in a delicate, uncertain balance.
And like all great stories of food and wine, this one begins not in a grocery store or a glossy brand headquarters…but in the soil.
The World of a Cocoa Tree
So, cocoa trees grow in the narrow equator belt, a thin ring around the world where humidity, heat, rainfall, and shade balance in just the right harmony to keep cacao alive. They aren’t hardy crops in any way shape or form. They’re sensitive, temperamental beings, needing near-constant nurturing. If you read my article on Pinot Noir, you probably know what I’m talking about when plants are like goldilocks (this is too hot, too cold, too etc etc).
Most of the world’s chocolate, like 60% or more, comes from two neighboring West African countries, the Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Walk into almost any store in the United States, and the chocolate bar you pick up is almost certainly grown by farmers in these regions. Millions of families rely on these orchards, millions of livelihoods rise and fall with the fate of the cocoa bean.
But in the last few years, something has changed that cracked open the fragile ecosystem faster than an egg on the hard tile of my kitchen floor.
Rains have become erratic at best, drought lingers longer than comfortable, and heat spikes at the wrong moment, similar to other places like California. Floods arrive when they’re least expected in the area now, and climate change isn’t a distant threat in cocoa country anymore, it’s a daily intruder.
2023–2025 became a trilogy of difficult years when droughts dried flowering pods and long, pounding rains drowned seedlings and caused fungal growth on what survived. Extreme heat stressed trees already fighting for nutrients, just like the vines in Napa in 2017.
Of course, this lead to a massive drop in cocoa production.
One season saw production fall almost 13%, pushing total global supply to around 4.37 million metric tons, which if you have no concept of what that means (like me), it’s down almost half a million tons from what the industry needed to produce.
Less cocoa + same demand = historic price spike.
Side note: if you’re like me and obsessed with growing things, I bought myself this tiny little cocoa plant on Amazon and hope I can make it happy inside my home for the next few years until it grows me plenty of cocoa (a girl can dream).
Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus (CSSV)
As if the climate chaos wasn’t enough, cocoa trees are battling their own plague, a disease spread by tiny insects, capable of wiping out 20–50% of a farmer’s yield. Sound familiar? The Tiny Bug That Nearly Killed Wine: The Story of Phylloxera.
Once a tree is infected, there is no cure, it just has to be cut down and burned. Replanting trees isn’t like replanting flowers on your front porch. It takes 3-5 years to get any fruit at all from a cocoa tree, but 7-10 years to get reliable production out of them.
That’s like losing half your income overnight, with absolutely no ability to stop the spread.
Entire orchards have been cleared at this point in time. Some regions report losses so severe that generational farmers have abandoned cocoa altogether. Let me say that another way: people who inherited cocoa farms from their grandparents (or add a few greats to that) are leaving the cocoa industry for good even though they expected it to be all they had to do for their entire lives then pass it along to their children.
Chocolate cannot grow faster to fill demand without trees to produce cocoa.
This is why the supply shortage feels different now, it’s not a one-season blip and rising with the pace of inflation, it’s structural.
The Price Spike
So this brings me to the thing that started all my musings in the first place: the spike in price and the shrinkage of chocolate. In early 2024 and into 2025, cocoa prices broke every historical record. $6,000 per metric ton, then $8,000, then $10,000. It even hit beyond $10.75 per kilogram at its peak, a ludicrous number for an agricultural product.
Cocoa was around $2,500 per ton a few years ago.
Chocolate makers panicked as costs doubled or tripled. Some major chocolate producers literally ran out of beans. In Côte d’Ivoire, factories halted production because farmers couldn’t deliver enough cocoa to keep them running.
This has never happened on this scale before in case you were wondering.
If you’re a chocolate lover like me, then you’ve noticed a bar that was once 3.5 ounces is now 3 ounces. A pack that used to have 12 truffles now has 10 in it, or even a box the same size…but mysteriously lighter.
It’s not because chocolate companies are sneaky villains (although right now they feel like it when I want my fix). They’re trying not to shock consumers with a $9 candy bar, even though, if they didn’t shrink the product, that’s exactly where prices would land. Shrinkflation is the industry’s attempt to survive when ingredient costs have doubled or tripled in such a short period of time.
And chocolate is far from the only food doing this, but none of them have the nostalgia that chocolate gives me, so I didn’t care to look into them. When my chocolate bar shrinks, it feels personal.
To cope with soaring cocoa prices, some brands are also quietly trying to alter their recipes. Not by removing the chocolate entirely, but by using less of it. Your bar today may contain more sugar or use cheaper fats while relying more heavily on milk powder. Some are trying to incorporate cocoa substitutes or reduce actual cocoa solids. Honestly, a mess no matter which way you look at it.
Some companies even claim these bars taste “just as good, if not better.” And sometimes they do…to the untrained palate. Unfortunately for them, I made my living off my palate tasting and finding the subtle nuances in wine, so I can absolutely taste the difference.
Fewer cocoa solids mean fewer antioxidants, fewer flavonoids, fewer of the heart-healthy compounds that made dark chocolate a wellness darling. So while your tastebuds might adapt to this blasphemous shift, the nutritional profile will not.
Farmers Are Financially Struggling
In Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, the government sets a fixed price farmers are paid. These prices change only once or twice a year, meaning that while traders, speculators, processors, and multinational chocolate companies feel the shock of prices immediately the farmers feel it last.
While the world is reporting “record cocoa prices” the farmers are still being paid the same amount as last season.
Many farmers still earn the equivalent of $1–$2 a day according to The International Labour Organization (ILO) & World Bank Reports I could find on the Google machine.
Chocolate is a $100+ billion global industry, but the people who grow the beans often live below the extreme poverty line.
The U.S. buys nearly one-third of the world’s chocolate, and me about a third of that (just kidding, sorry, trying to lighten the morose mood), Europe consumes almost half, and Asia’s demand is exploding as disposable incomes rise. Even with higher prices, chocolate sales remain remarkably stable. When fewer people buy chocolate, they don’t stop, they just buy slightly smaller bars.
Chocolate is recession-resilient and that steadiness puts even more pressure on supply.
Some regions are trying to save the cocoa trees. Ecuador is rising fast, producing high-quality specialty cocoa. Peru is expanding their acreage while Brazil is re-entering the global market after decades of disease wiped out their old production levels. Indonesia is trying to restore cocoa output after climate impacts and low prices pushed farmers toward palm oil.
While the rest of the world rushes to help fill in the production demand issue, it’ll be years before these new regions can significantly offset West Africa’s production declines. And climate change doesn’t spare these regions either.
Chocolate as a Luxury
In the late 1800s, chocolate was expensive, but for over a century, we’ve lived in a golden age where chocolate was cheap, abundant, and accessible to everyone.
That era…could be ending in the next few years.
Chocolate might not disappear completely, but it might return to its roots with smaller servings, higher prices, and more emphasis on the quality and terroir from where it’s made.
Mass-market chocolate will of course survive, but it will need to lean more heavily on sugar, fillers, and lower cocoa percentages to stay afloat. Real chocolate, the deep, rich, high-cocoa chocolate, is probably going to shift into the realm of wine, cheese, or olive oil, something you savor, and search for the higher quality of.
If this post bummed you out (sorry), and you want higher quality chocolate, look for higher cocoa percentages in your packages. 70% and above usually means more actual cocoa, but read the ingredients, too. Cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar, and not much else. Try to explore single-origin bars as these chocolates capture the unique flavors of the region, more terroir-friendly: fruity, floral, nutty, earthy.
In the end, chocolate will live on, but most likely will be deeply changed by everything going on in the world around it. I hope you buy yourself some lovely chocolate today and as you savor it think about the trees, the farmers, and the weather that all worked against the odds for you to enjoy that creamy indulgence.
