Valentine’s chocolate

With the price of cocoa beans setting unprecedented records on the commodities market, this year means it is certainly turning 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.

No beans, no Valentine’s chocolate

“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 (€1909) a ton in the summer of 2022, it really took over early last year and peaked at well over $12,000 (€11454) during the Christmas season and has been hovering around the $10,000 (€9546) 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 past year alone while de Selliers said that it depended very much on producer to producer.

The perfect chocolate storm

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 West 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 led to too many harvests failing

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.”

Chocolate love within reach

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.

“I really, really hope the money goes to the farmers,” Persoone said.

So, in the meantime and 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.”