If you’re not a fan of nuts in your sweets, Valentine’s Day could cost you more this year. The chocolates inside many of this holiday’s heart-shaped boxes will likely contain more filler ingredients like nuts and fruits to offset the cost of pure chocolate.
“We used to look at hazelnuts and pistachio as an expensive inclusion,” said Jacques Torres, a chocolatier with high-end shops in New York City. “Today, those nuts allow us to lower the cost of our chocolate bar.”
The price of raw cocoa, chocolate’s key ingredient, has surged by 200% over the past year, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks online retail prices. On global commodities markets, cocoa futures are down slightly in recent weeks after peaking above $12,000 per ton — a record — just before Christmas. Two years ago, they were less than $2,500.
We used to look at hazelnuts and pistachio as an expensive inclusion. Today, those nuts allow us to lower the cost of a chocolate bar.
Chocolatier Jacques Torres
Torres said he had to raise prices by 20% last month to offset the higher costs, and he anticipates another hike before the end of the year.
The historic price run-up just ahead of the chocolate industry’s biggest day of the year has been months in the making. Disruptive weather patterns fueled by climate change have hammered West Africa, where most of the world’s cacao, the raw form of the bean that gets processed into cocoa, is grown. Similar challenges have been mounting for coffee farmers, too, fueling a sharp price spike on global markets that consumers are increasingly expected to feel this year.
The cacao bean grows best in temperatures up to 89 degrees Fahrenheit and with annual rainfall less than 2,000 millimeters. In 2024, 71% of cacao-producing areas in West Africa experienced an average of 42 days with temperatures above that heat threshold, with some areas receiving 40% more rainfall than expected during the peak of the rainy season, according to a report released this week by Climate Central, a climate research institute.
The increased temperatures and precipitation contribute to fungal diseases in cacao beans, the researchers said. Warm, humid conditions also breed mealybugs, which can spread an infection that spoils cacao crops. The combined impact of excessive heat and rainfall severely affected yield for cacao farmers. In the 2023-2024 harvest season, production was down 13.1% from the previous season, the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute told NBC News.
Intensifying and more frequent extreme heat events and excessive precipitation are directly linked to global warming, as rising temperatures trap more moisture in the atmosphere. Climate scientists project excessive rainfall patterns to persist in West Africa through the rest of the century, while the entire continent warms 0.3 degrees Celsius faster per decade than the worldwide average.
“This is kind of the new norm,” said Jason Clay, the executive director of the Markets Institute for the World Wildlife Fund. “With climate change, we’re seeing that there are more bad years than there are good years in some crops, in some locations.”
The Wells Fargo researchers estimate the cocoa supply deficit is now the worst it’s been in 60 years, standing at negative 478,000 metric tons. The crunch is triggering doubts about festivities beyond Valentine’s Day.
“Now the big question is about Easter,” Torres said. “The bigger question is next Christmas — that’s where things are going to be a little bit more sticky.”
Even Hershey is responding to the market squeeze. The chocolate giant requested permission from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to buy over 90,000 metric tons of cocoa, more than nine times the amount allowed by the exchange, Bloomberg reported last month. Regulators denied the request, saying a sale that large would’ve monopolized the global supply.
A Hershey spokesperson didn’t comment on the CFTC decision but dismissed worries of a shortage, saying the company “has a rigorous commodity procurement process, and we are well-covered in our cocoa needs for 2025.”
David Branch, sector manager of Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, predicts chocolate products could become the next victim of shrinkflation — when brands reduce the size of their products without adjusting prices proportionately, a practice that has drawn scrutiny among Democratic lawmakers as contributing to inflation.
With climate change, we’re seeing that there are more bad years than there are good years in some crops.
Jason Clay, World Wildlife Fund
“The 30-piece bags of the mini candy bars, I think we’re going to see that shrink a little bit,” Branch said. “It may be 20 pieces in a bag instead of 30, and the price point kind of stays the same.”
Chocolate sales topped $21 billion in the 12 months ending in mid-August last year, up 1.5% from the prior 12-month period, according to the National Confectioners Association, even as units sold fell nearly 5% — indicating consumers spent more for less chocolate.
Keeping chocolate affordable will require stepped-up environmental protections in cocoa-producing areas, advocates warn.
“Climate change has barely started to affect food production. It’s going to get much worse,” Clay said. “The good news is that if you get trees planted for shade, you can actually reduce temperatures from getting as hot as they do in these deforested areas.”
Clay said chocolate producers need to work together, rather than in competition, to invest in protective measures. That includes planting more trees, ensuring sustainable pay for cacao farmers and genetically modifying crops to become more disease-resistant.
“It won’t mitigate all the impacts of climate change, but it will reduce the biggest impacts,” he said. “That’s really what we need to hope for.”
In the meantime, consumers may have to deal with more nuts and fruits in their chocolate, or reach for different types of candies altogether.
Younger consumers may already be leading the way. The NCA cited Gen Z and millennial consumers’ taste for “all things sour, flavor mashups, different textures, and flavor experiences” for helping drive a 5.4% jump in sales of non-chocolate candies in 2024 — a bigger uptick than either chocolate or gum and mints saw last year.
