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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Mexicoās amazing plant, chocolate, is literally a food of the gods, Theobrama cacao ā ĪøĪµĻĻ (theos), meaning āgodā or ādivineā, and Ī²Ļįæ¶Ī¼Ī± (meaning food of) ā delicious, nutritious and wonderful. The world outside Mexico, colonizers, and worldās 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 ā 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, Iām 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 wasnāt 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 fatherās 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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They appear to be a proactive company.
Mars Turns to CRISPR.
Mars licensed Pairwiseās Fulcrum gene-editing platform, including its SHARC enzyme, which enables scientists to precisely modify cocoa plants. Instead of waiting for traditional crossbreeding, which may take decades, CRISPR targets specific traits, such as disease resistance, drought tolerance, or higher yields, in a fraction of the time.
DB2
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Ok, so Hershey will raise pricesāmaybe a lot. Will customers continue to pay it? What will happen to profits? Or will customers find substitutes? Or skip their dose of chocolate?
Will there be chocolate Easter bunnies next year? Will chocolate candy be affordable for Halloween? We will know soon enough? Payday bars could be popular this year!!
My info may be out of date, but I recall on the old TMF I posted an article about a blight that was wiping out chocolate. It generated a panic among some TMFers on the Atheist Board (somewhat tongue in cheek).
Iām not finding any recent info. This is from 2018: Cocoa, Currency and a Chocolate Crisis | University of Arizona News
This article says it is attacking the West African plants. Ohā¦found another oneā¦more recent.
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But the farmers combat the problem by giving vaccines to the trees to inoculate them from the virus. Donāt tell RFK Jr.!
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Government price controls didnāt work so well.
Cocoa sales in the two countries ā which grow more than half of global supply ā have long been controlled by government regulators that fix farmer pay and market the beansā¦
But as futures surged to an all-time high in 2024, and crashed more than 70% thereafter, the system has made it difficult both for farmers to benefit from the rally and traders to remain profitable on the decline. With warehouses and ports clogged with unsold beans, and cocoa prices still falling, thatās straining the supply chain and sparking changes that could alter the global cocoa market for years to comeā¦
Regulators, who sell most of the crop months before itās collected, couldnāt fulfill all the contracts in that year [2024] rolling some to the next harvest. And chocolate manufacturers were left searching for ways to contain costsā¦The cratering demand, coupled with improving production, caused the market to correct quicklyā¦
āFarmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast completely missed out on the way up, and theyāve completely missed out on the way down.āā¦The country [Ghana] now plans to introduce a flexible system that would allow for automatic domestic price adjustments when international prices change, Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson told reporters.
DB2
I love chocolate but most if not all chocolate bars have added sugar and when they advertise no added sugar they have artificial sweeteners which are worse. Back home in Venezuela I could buy artisanal cacao on the road, no sugars added. I found a German cacao powder that seems not to have any bad additives. Every so often I make a cup of hot chocolate with coconut milk.
The Captain
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If they are eating that their judgement is bad to begin with, so yes.