BRUGES, Belgium — St. Valentine chocolates always seek to show how deep your love is. This year, it might just also show how deep your pockets are.
With the price of cocoa beans setting unprecedented records on the commodities market, it will certainly turn the gift of love into a bigger financial commitment than it once was. Turns out that if love is reputed to be eternal, a low price for cocoa, the essential ingredient in chocolate, is not.
“The price increase of cocoa is absolutely spectacular, now for 2, 2½ years,” said Philippe de Sellier, the head of both Leonidas and Belgian chocolate federation Choprabisco. When it stood at less than $2,000 a ton in the summer of 2022, it really took over early last year and peaked at well over $12,000 during the Christmas season and has been hovering around the $10,000 mark since.
“We are seeing unprecedented prices. They haven’t been this high for the last 50 years,” said Bart Van Besien, policy adviser of the Oxfam fair trade group. And the impact can be felt deep in chocolate gourmet country Belgium, where some of its 280 chocolate companies are left with a bleeding heart during Valentine’s week.
Dominque Persoone, owner of the famed Chocolate Line brand, still has plenty of beans to grind in his workshop in Bruges, but considers himself lucky, partly because he also has his own cocoa plantation in Mexico.
“I have a lot of colleagues who are really in trouble, because the price is too high,” he said. “If you don’t have good contacts, they just don’t deliver anymore.”
Some just close for Valentine, he said, turning one of the few financial bonanzas of the year into a forced vacation, hoping that Easter, with its eggs and bunnies, will bring better tidings. Many chocolatiers can’t go for the usual profit margins and turn all the extra costs of the cocoa prices over to their customers. Persoone said that his chocolates increased in price by 20% over the last year alone while de Selliers said that it depends very much from producer to producer.
The shock of cocoa prices pretty much is a metaphorical perfect storm, mixing climate, disease, commodity speculation, the plight of farmers and social ascendency around the world into one heady mix.
“The drop that has happened now in production was directly linked to climate change,” said Van Besien, blaming changes in annual rain and drought patterns in western Africa that weakened the sensitive trees in key production areas. Persoone also said that the temperature differences between night and day increased in the small strip of land around the equator where the trees can thrive. Compounded by disease, it made sure too many harvests failed.
At the same time across the world, populations lifted themselves out of poverty, middle classes expanded in places like China and the craving for the delicacy increased.
And making matters worse, the years of slumping prices for the beans simply drove farmers off the land to look for a better future in the cities and pushed production further down. De Selliers said that “60 % of cocoa comes from Ivory Coast and Ghana and these farmers have to make a better living. It is extremely important.”
Persoone concurred: “We didn’t pay enough to have an honest price for the farmers.”
So, strangely enough, low prices then, help cause high prices now.
“The big irony in the cocoa industry is that farmers are now getting a fair price at the moment they are abandoning cocoa farming,” Van Besien said. “With the price they are getting right now, they could have invested in sustainable practices. They could have sent their children to school.”
Does it mean a premier box of chocolates is a guilty pleasure on Valentine’s Day?
“Yeah, the guilt question …. It’s one that always works,” said Van Besien, the fair trade expert. “We could not survive if we would be thinking about these things all the time,” arguing that legislation should trump consumer emotions.
“We should have laws that make buying cocoa below the cost of the production something illegal. And it should not be up to the consumer to make this decision,” he said. Both de Selliers and Persoone hope that if the prices drop down again, they stay around the $5,000 or $6,000 mark.
“I really, really hope the money goes to the farmers,” Persoone said.
So in the meantime, despite the price hikes, the chocolate shouldn’t leave too bitter a taste.
“It’s a small luxury that most people still can afford,” Persoone said. “I hope it stays like this.”
