Chocolate Love has its price on Valentine’s Day as cocoa costs cause hearts to shake, not flattening

Brugge, Belgium (AP) – St. Valentine chocolates always try to show how deep your love is. This year it might just show how deep your pockets are.

With The price of cocoa beans When you put unprecedented items in the commodity market, it will certainly transform the gift of love into a greater financial commitment than it once was. It turns out that if love is known to be eternal, a low price for cocoa, the essential ingredient in chocolate, is not.

No beans, no valentine’s chocolate

“The price increase of cocoa is absolutely spectacular, now for 2, 2½ years,” said Philippe de Sellier, the leader of both Leonidas and the Belgian Chocolate Association Chopisco. When it was at less than $ 2,000 tonnes in the summer of 2022, it really took over the beginning of last year and topped with well over $ 12,000 during the Christmas season and has hovered around the $ 10,000 brand since.

“We see unprecedented prices. They have not been so high in the last 50 years, ”said Bart van Besien, police adviser for Oxfam Fair Trade Group. And the effect can be felt deep in the Chocolate Gourmet Country Belgium, where some of its 280 chocolate companies have a bleeding heart in Valentine’s week.

Dominque Persoone, owner of the famous chocolate line mark, still has plenty of beans to grind in his workshop in Bruges, but consider himself lucky, partly because he also has his own cocoa plantation in Mexico.

“I have a lot of colleagues who are really in trouble because the price is too high,” he said. “If you don’t have good contacts, they just don’t deliver anymore.”

Some are just close to Valentine, he said, making one of this year’s few financial bonanzas a forced holiday, Hope the EasterWith its eggs and rabbits, will bring better messages. Many chocolate companies cannot go after the usual profit margins and turn all the extra costs of the cocoa prices to their customers. Persoone said his chocolates rose in price by 20% over the past year, while the Selliers said it depends a lot on producer for producer.

The perfect chocolate storm

The shock of cocoa prices is largely a metaphorical perfect storm that blends climate, illness, raw material speculation, farmer’s situation and social ascent around the world to a tough mix.

“The drop that has happened now in production was directly linked to climate change,” said Van Besien, accused of changes in annual rain and drought patterns in western Africa that weakened the sensitive trees in key production areas. Persoone also said that the temperature differences between night and day rose in the small strip of soil around the equator where the trees can thrive. Association of illness made sure that too many harvests failed.

At the same time all over the world, the population lifted out of poverty, middle classes expanded in places like China, and the urge for the delicacy rose.

And aggravate things, the years of falling prices for the prayers simply drove farmers from the country to look for a better future in the cities and pushed production further down. The Selliers said that “60 % of cocoa comes from the Ivory Coast and Ghana and that these farmers should live better. It is extremely important. ”

Persoone joined: “We didn’t pay enough to have an honest award for the farmers.”

So weird enough, low prices, then helps to cause high prices now.

“The great irony of the cocoa industry is that farmers now get a reasonable price the moment they give up cocoa farming,” said Van Besien. “With the price they are getting right now, they could have invested in sustainable practice. They could have sent their children to school. ”

Chocolate love within easy

Does that mean a leading box of chocolate is a guilty pleasure on Valentine’s Day?

“Yes, the guilt question …. It’s one that always works,” said Van Besien, the Fair Trade expert. “We couldn’t survive if we were constantly thinking about these things,” and argued that legislation should trump consumer feelings.

“We should have laws that do to buy cocoa during the cost of production something illegal. And it shouldn’t be up to the consumer to make this decision, ”he said. Both the Selliers and Persoone hope that if prices fall back down, they will remain around $ 5,000 or $ 6,000 mark.

“I really hope the money goes to the farmers,” Persoone said.

So, in the meantime, despite the price increases, the chocolate should not leave for bitter a taste.

“It’s a little luxury that most people still can afford,” Persoone said. “I hope it remains like that.”