Price of chocolate just went up. Walmart choc bar was $1.12, now $1.67 (no change to weight/size/source). Expect all choc products to go up quite significantly. A local producer said he expected 25% to 50% retail price increases.
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Mexico’s amazing plant, chocolate, is literally a food of the gods, Theobrama cacao — θεός (theos), meaning ‘god’ or ‘divine’, and βρῶμα (meaning food of) — delicious, nutritious and wonderful. The world outside Mexico, colonizers, and world’s upper classes are finally getting their taste and they want more more more.
No surprise. Not too coincidentally on this cold winter night, I have a cup of hot chocolate by me right now that I prepared from raw cacao beans. YUM!!!
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This is no surprise. Rising cocoa bean prices due to shortages have been a news item for at least a year. Is this drought? Climate change? Or just a normal commodity cycle?
Chocolate is likely to be more costly (or more substituted for) for a while. I notice that Hersheys Reeces were partly white at Halloween this year.
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The wider world — meaning many more people like in
asia and africa, with rising incomes, are discovering that chocolate is
WONDERFUL<<<
and so are buying more.
This should surprise no one.
d fb
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Chocolate is caffeine.
Is it caffeine or oil the most traded commodity on the planet. One or two?
As many of you know, I’m a big fan of the Acquired podcast. They just did an episode on Mars, Inc, the candy company. Sounds boring, right? Not at all! It is ripping good yarn.
Part of it is a pretty deep dive into the chocolate industry in America, and even before that. The human history of chocolate goes back about 5,000 years. It turns out it is surprisingly difficult to make chocolate on an industrial scale.
In the modern era, Milton Hershey founded a candy company, which he sold for a small fortune. He was looking for something to do with the money and wound up buying chocolate making equipment from a Swiss company.
He had no idea how to make chocolate bars (chocolate was something you drank at the time) and came up with a recipe through trial and error. He went all in and built a giant factory and starting producing.
Incredibly, Hershey maintained a near monopoly on US chocolate production for decades and all its competitors including Mars bought all their chocolate from Hershey. Part of it was no one else could figure how to make it, and part of it was that the capital costs were so high it was simply cheaper to buy from Hershey than make it yourself.
It wasn’t until Forrest Mars, the estranged son of Mars founder Franklin Mars started his own production as part of a wild double cross of both companies. Spoiler alert: Forrest winds up owning his father’s company.
Hershey was a moribund company and did literally no advertising until Mars started eating their lunch. This was touched on in an epic episode of Mad Men, when Hershey meets with Don Draper to explore an ad campaign, who instead convinces them not advertise.
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