Cocoa prices keep falling. Chocolate bars don't
Futures have dropped by a third since July, and Ivory Coast and Ghana are both forecasting smaller 2026/27 harvests. US chocolate still costs 14% more than a year ago.
Cocoa futures traded near $5,640 a tonne on 7 October, down by roughly a third from the eight-month high of $6,455 hit on 9 July, as a global surplus built through 2025/26 keeps short-term supply ample even while next season's outlook darkens.
Prices have swung hard this year. They touched roughly $5,100 a tonne on 1 October, their lowest since late July, before climbing back. ICE-certified cocoa stocks reached a two-and-a-quarter-year high of 3,481,504 bags on 30 September, a buildup that traders point to when explaining why the market keeps giving back its rallies.
The surplus sits awkwardly next to a weaker forecast for the coming season. Ivory Coast, the world's largest producer, is expected to harvest 1.75 to 1.8 million tonnes in 2026/27, down from about 2.2 million the season before, a roughly 17% drop in the main crop. Ghana, the second-largest producer, is forecast to fall 13% to 650,000 tonnes. Both estimates trace back to dry weather across the West African growing belt since the last harvest wrapped up.
A fixed-price system built for calmer markets is straining under bigger year-to-year swings.
Two governments, two different calls on price
Ghana and Ivory Coast set a fixed farmgate price at the start of each season, guaranteeing farmers a set sum regardless of how futures move. Earlier this year the two broke from their usual alignment: Ghana's cocoa board cut its price after roughly 50,000 tonnes of unsold cocoa piled up at its ports, with the board saying international buyers had turned away over prices that ran high against competing origins. Ivory Coast took a different route in January, launching a buyback of unsold stock that had built up in warehouses since the previous November rather than cutting its guaranteed price. Both moves point to the same problem: a fixed-price system built for calmer markets is straining under bigger year-to-year swings.
Chocolate makers, meanwhile, are stuck with cocoa they bought when futures were still near their 2024 peak above $12,000 a tonne. Mondelez was caught off guard when prices broke lower earlier in 2026, left holding higher-cost hedged stock from the elevated period. Lindt has said it could make selective price cuts in the second half of 2026 after its results raised doubts about demand holding up at current prices.
The gap between the farm and the shelf
None of this has caught up with the price tag on a chocolate bar. US chocolate prices were still running 14% above the same period in 2025 as of early this year, even as futures gave back most of their gains. J.P. Morgan's medium-term forecast sits near $6,000 a tonne, citing ongoing supply constraints; Rabobank expects inventories to keep rebuilding and prices to drift down, though not back to pre-2023 levels. Whichever forecast holds, the lag between a falling futures chart and a supermarket price sticker looks set to outlast this season, with farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast absorbing the swings either way, much as cocoa's earlier record 2025/26 harvest in Ghana did little to soften the squeeze.
Whether the 2026/27 shortfall turns into a new price spike, as it did in 2024, depends largely on how much of that West African dry spell shows up in December's mid-crop figures. Until then, the chocolate aisle is pricing in the last crisis, not the next one, a pattern familiar from desserts built on the same bean, like Vienna's Sachertorte.
