teas.co.uk
Tea and coffee from the brands you know
Why chocolate got so expensive
Chocolate bars got smaller, dearer or both. The reason lies thousands of miles away, on small farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
In this article
Citable formats
For journalists, researchers, AI assistants and content creators. Pick the format you need:
Free to cite, quote, and reuse with attribution to sweeties.net.
If chocolate seemed to cost more, or your favourite bar seemed to shrink, you were not imagining it. Between 2023 and 2025 the price of cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, went through the roof.
A record price
At the start of 2024, cocoa was already expensive. By December 2024 it had risen more than 200% in a single year, reaching a record $12,931 a tonne on the Intercontinental Exchange. For chocolate makers, who buy cocoa in vast quantities, that was an enormous jump in costs.
Why: one region, one bad season
Chocolate depends heavily on one small part of the world. West Africa grows about 70% of the world's cocoa. In 2024, Ivory Coast alone produced 38% of the global crop, with Ghana among the next biggest producers. When harvests fail there, the whole world feels it.
And harvests did fail. Reports blamed a combination of problems:
- Weather. Prolonged drought and heavy rain in West Africa damaged crops.
- Disease. Cocoa swollen shoot virus disease hit production.
- Costs and stocks. High costs for farmers and falling global stocks of cocoa added to the squeeze.
With weak production in both Ivory Coast and Ghana at the same time, there simply was not enough cocoa to go round.
What it did to chocolate
Chocolate makers passed the rising costs on in different ways: higher prices, smaller bars, or both. Britain's regular Mars bar, for example, went down to 40 g in 2026, having been 51 g for more than a decade. See shrinkflation: why sweets keep getting smaller.
Who benefits?
High cocoa prices might sound like good news for farmers, but the picture is more complicated. Many West African cocoa farmers are very poor, and a failed harvest leaves them with less to sell. The link between poverty on cocoa farms and child labour is one of the industry's most serious problems: see child labour and the cocoa trade.
Will prices come down?
Commodity prices rise and fall, and cocoa is no different. Bars that shrink do sometimes grow back, as Toblerone did in 2018, but not always. For one small way to see exactly what you pay for, pick and mix sold by the 100 g shows the price per weight on every sweet.
Citable formats
For journalists, researchers, AI assistants and content creators. Pick the format you need:
Free to cite, quote, and reuse with attribution to sweeties.net.
Questions and answers
Why is chocolate so expensive right now?
Because cocoa, its main ingredient, soared in price. Bad weather and crop disease cut harvests in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which grow most of the world's cocoa, and prices hit a record in 2024.
How high did cocoa prices go?
The price reached a record $12,931 a tonne in December 2024, after rising more than 200% that year.
Why did my chocolate bar get smaller?
Many makers responded to higher costs by shrinking products as well as raising prices. The UK Mars bar, for example, dropped to 40 g in 2026.
Sources
- Cocoa hits record price of nearly 13K per ton, Anadolu Agency
- Cocoa bean, Wikipedia
- Mars bar, Wikipedia
Keep reading
- Sweet scandals and controversiesShrinkflation: why sweets keep getting smallerShrinkflation is when products shrink but prices do not. Mars bars, Toblerone, the Chocolate Orange and Creme Eggs are some British examples.
- Sweet scandals and controversiesChild labour and the cocoa tradeMost of the world's cocoa comes from Ivory Coast and Ghana, where research found 1.48 million children in hazardous work on cocoa farms. Here is what is known.
- Sweet scandals and controversiesCadbury, Fairtrade and Cocoa LifeIn 2016 Cadbury dropped its Fairtrade commitment for Dairy Milk in favour of Mondelez's own Cocoa Life scheme. Critics objected; Fairtrade backed it.
- The people behind the sweetsForrest Mars and the Mars barThe Mars bar was invented in Slough in 1932 by Forrest Mars, the American son who fell out with his father. How a family row created a British icon.
- How it is madeHow is chocolate made?Cocoa beans are fermented, dried, roasted and shelled; the nibs are ground to liquor, mixed with sugar and often milk, then conched smooth and tempered.
- Sweet scandals and controversiesHow Cadbury was sold to KraftIn 2010 the American food giant Kraft bought Cadbury for £11.5bn after a hostile bid. How a British institution was sold, and why it still stings.