Written by: Lucy Bennetto | July 7th 2026
Chocolate has had a wild ride lately, and I can guarantee 90% of us out there still have no idea. You didn't ask, but I'm going to use today to share some facts, all for the good of chocolate, of course!
At the end of 2024, cocoa prices hit an all-time high of nearly USD 12,900 per tonne, a level nobody in the industry had seen before. Climate change, ageing trees and crop disease across West Africa, where Ivory Coast and Ghana alone grow more than 60% of the world's cocoa, sent supply into freefall just as demand kept climbing. By early 2026, prices had crashed by roughly 70% from that peak, dropping to under USD 3,000 a tonne in some readings, before climbing back to around USD 5,000 on renewed weather concerns. Twelve months of freefall followed by a sharp bounce is almost unheard of in a commodity market, and we're not out of the woods yet. Prices are likely to keep swinging in the years ahead, and nobody can say with any real certainty when, or by how much.
Here's the part that catches most consumers off guard: even though wholesale cocoa prices have fallen a long way from their 2024 peak, chocolate on the shelf hasn't got any cheaper here either. Chocolate prices in New Zealand have taken a decent step higher over the past year, even as cocoa futures eased. Across the ditch, this year's annual Easter egg audit found some chocolate eggs on sale were smaller but more expensive for the second year running. The reason is structural: manufacturers hedge and lock in cocoa supplies well in advance, so today's retail prices are largely still reflecting yesterday's cocoa market. We're all paying yesterday's cocoa crisis at today's checkout.
Faced with that cost pressure, a lot of the industry has quietly changed the chocolate itself. Portion sizes have shrunk. Some manufacturers have cut cocoa content and used fillers like vegetable oil in its place, and a handful are experimenting with cocoa-free alternatives altogether. My own bars got smaller too, but not as a reaction to this crisis. I made that call two years earlier, moving to a new, more efficient piece of machinery optimised for an 80g mould, so I could keep a whole bar at an accessible $5 price point (that hasn't exactly aged well, has it?). Accessibility has always been part of what I stand for, I just didn't see the crisis coming. Most chocolate makers, big and small, are genuinely trying to do right by their customers and producers. It's just not an easy market to do that in right now.
The people carrying the real risk
The volatility in cocoa prices makes headlines because of what it does to chocolate companies' margins and consumers' wallets. What gets far less attention is what it does to the farmers growing the cocoa in the first place.
Tonya Lander, a biology lecturer at Oxford University, told FoodNavigator that if global demand for cocoa drops in response to high prices, it's smallholder farmers who feel it hardest, potentially going without medicine and education for their kids. These are households already dealing with climate pressure and economic instability well beyond their control. A price spike that squeezes a manufacturer's margin for a year is, for a farming family, the difference between sending a child to school or not. The price a farmer gets paid can't be left to chance, especially in a year like this one.
Why Fairtrade matters more than ever
I know I'm always banging on about Fairtrade, but right now it genuinely matters more than usual. Fairtrade certification means farmers get a guaranteed minimum price regardless of what the futures market is doing, plus a premium that cooperatives invest back into their communities, in schools, healthcare, and infrastructure. When cocoa prices are this volatile, that floor is the difference between a farming family riding out the swings and one going without.
It's not really about which brand does it. It's about backing the system itself. Every time a shopper chooses Fairtrade chocolate, big label or small, they're helping keep that floor in place for the people at the start of the supply chain, the ones with the least power to absorb a bad year.
A different kind of celebration
World Chocolate Day usually gets celebrated by eating chocolate purely as an excuse to get more of the stuff and feel justified. But this year, in the middle of the most volatile stretch the cocoa market has seen in decades, it's also worth thinking a little more about who it was fair to along the way.
However you're marking the day, I hope it's with chocolate that's jolly delicious, and one you can feel properly good about.
Happy World Chocolate Day.
Lucy
