From Collapse to Surplus: The Turnaround in Cocoa Prices and What It Means for Real Chocolate
After two years of historic crisis, the global cocoa market is projecting its first surplus in years — but the recovery is more fragile and uneven than the numbers suggest.
In 2024, cocoa prices on international exchanges hit historic records, reaching peaks between US$10,000 and US$13,000 per tonne according to reporting from the time — a spike driven by crop failures in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, worsened by plant disease and the climate effects associated with El Niño. The impact reached Brazilian consumers fast: chocolate prices rose 24.77% over 12 months, and Easter eggs became up to 26% more expensive, according to Metropoles and Seu Dinheiro.
Two years later, the picture has started to shift. The International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), in its most recent quarterly bulletins, is projecting the first global production surplus in several seasons for the 2025/2026 cycle — though the exact size of that projection has been repeatedly revised downward: StoneX cut its surplus estimate from 287,000 tonnes (January 2026) to 247,000 tonnes (April 2026), while the ICCO's May 2026 bulletin brought a more conservative figure of 48,000 tonnes.
On the pricing side, there's also a sign of partial relief — but not a return to pre-crisis levels. Sources from February 2026 reported cocoa retreating to just over US$3,000 per tonne; futures checked in July 2026, however, showed contracts trading around US$5,320 per tonne. This divergence likely reflects real market volatility over the intervening months — not a sourcing error — but it reinforces that any specific cocoa price figure should be checked at the time of reading, not treated as a fixed reference.
What This Means for Makers of Real Chocolate
The crisis of the past two years left a structural mark: large-scale manufacturers reformulated recipes, cutting the proportion of cocoa and substituting vegetable fat — part of the reasoning behind Brazil's new legislation requiring more transparency about what actually goes into a bar labeled "chocolate." Even with signs of a surplus on the horizon, industry analysts point to persistent structural risks in West Africa, where most of the world's cocoa comes from — if price relief comes, it will likely be gradual and uneven across origins.
For Brazil, which today has more than 500 bean-to-bar and single-origin chocolate brands according to industry surveys (a figure without a confirmed primary source), the moment is revealing for another reason: in a raw-material crisis, it becomes easier to see who kept their cocoa ratio intact and who quietly diluted the recipe.
Our take:
We don't make chocolate, and we're not here to predict whether cocoa prices will fall. But we follow this closely because the price of the raw material is also a thermometer of honesty: when cocoa gets expensive, the temptation to dilute the recipe grows — and that's exactly the moment when it becomes easier to spot who kept the cocoa ratio and who swapped it for vegetable fat. Our job here is to help you see that difference before you decide where to spend.