The 2024 cocoa spike: why chocolate got expensive

Published 2026-09-05; updated 2026-09-05.

The 2024 cocoa spike was the run-up in the world cocoa price from an average of $3.28 per kilogram across 2023 to a record monthly average of $10.75 per kilogram in January 2025, followed by an equally sharp fall to $3.24 per kilogram in March 2026 (World Bank Pink Sheet). It happened because successive West African harvests disappointed in a crop where two neighboring countries grow nearly half the world’s beans, and because a cocoa tree cannot be planted and harvested inside a price cycle.

Why could supply not answer the price?

Cocoa is a perennial tree crop grown overwhelmingly by smallholders. In 2024 Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) produced 1.89 million tonnes of beans, 36.2% of the world’s 5.22 million tonnes, with Indonesia second at 632,702 tonnes, or 12.1%, and Ghana third at 530,000 tonnes, or 10.1%; the top five of 57 producing countries accounted for 72.9% of output (FAOSTAT). Concentration of that kind means the world crop is effectively a West African weather report.

The trees themselves set the response time. A cacao seedling takes several years to bear and yields best between roughly its tenth and twenty-fifth year, so replanting costs a farmer years of income before it returns any. Much of the West African stock is past its best, and the forest frontier that once absorbed new planting is gone or protected. Ghana’s output fell at an average of 4.7% a year over the ten years to 2024, while Ecuador’s, grown on newer and more intensively managed plantations, rose at 10.0% a year (FAOSTAT). High prices redirect planting toward Latin America over years, not months.

Disease compounds the delay. Cocoa swollen shoot virus has no cure, and the remedy of cutting out infected farms removes production for the years it takes to replant. Black pod, a fungus, rots pods in wet weather. Both spread faster on old, unshaded farms, so the same conditions that reduce yields also reduce the ability to recover from them.

The price signal is also blunted at the farm gate. Ivory Coast and Ghana sell much of the crop forward before the season opens and fix a farmgate price for the year, so the world price that rose through 2024 did not reach growers in the same season. That is defensible as income smoothing and it slows the supply response, since a farmer who never sees the peak has no reason to fertilize for it.

Finally, the market where the price is discovered is small. Cocoa trades on two contracts of 10 tonnes each, and the deliverable stock in exchange warehouses is finite. When certified stocks drain, nearby months move to a premium over later ones, physical buyers chase whatever beans exist at wider origin differentials, and processors who had sold chocolate forward must buy at any price. Hedgers who were short futures against physical beans faced daily margin calls as the price climbed, and some reduced positions rather than fund them, which adds buying to a rising market. None of this changes the harvest; all of it changes the price.

Monthly averages of the ICE New York and London markets as published in the World Bank Pink Sheet.

A worked example

Put the move through one futures lot. The ICE Futures US cocoa contract covers 10 tonnes, quoted in dollars per tonne (exchange contract specifications, checked September 2026). At the 2023 average of $3.28 per kilogram, that lot represented $32,800 of cocoa. At the January 2025 record of $10.75 per kilogram it represented $107,500, and at $5.95 per kilogram in August 2026, $59,500 (World Bank Pink Sheet). A grinder that had hedged 500 tonnes with 50 lots saw the cash value of that hedge swing by roughly $3.7 million between the 2023 average and the January 2025 peak, paid or received day by day as variation margin.

The shape of the move matters as much as its size. The spot price first peaked at $9.74 per kilogram in April 2024, then fell back to $6.52 by September 2024 as the market judged the shortage priced in, before making a higher high of $10.75 in January 2025 when the next West African crop disappointed as well. Two peaks nine months apart, with a 33% drawdown in between, is a good description of a market with no inventory buffer: every new piece of crop information moves the price fully, because there is no stock to absorb it. That relationship between inventory and price sensitivity is the subject of stocks-to-use.

Two comparisons put the record in proportion. First, in real terms it was not a record at all: $10.75 per kilogram in January 2025 sits well below the $4.36 per kilogram of July 1977, which is $22.50 per kilogram once restated in 2024 dollars (World Bank Pink Sheet; BLS CPI via FRED). Second, cocoa is only part of a chocolate bar. Sugar, the other main ingredient by weight in milk chocolate, averaged $0.38 per kilogram in August 2026 on the world raw price, barely changed from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). When one input multiplies by three and another does not move, the finished product does not multiply by three.

By August 2026 the benchmark was $5.95 per kilogram, 21.7% below a year earlier and about 45% below the January 2025 record, with the low of the cycle at $3.24 per kilogram in March 2026 (World Bank Pink Sheet). The trees planted in response to the spike will bear for decades, which is how a perennial crop turns a shortage into a later surplus.

The full series is on the cocoa price page, the growing regions and marketing boards on the cocoa origins page, and the sugar comparison on the sugar price page. For the general anatomy of a spike, see why commodity prices spike; for the weather pattern behind several West African seasons, see El Niño and La Niña.

Cite as: Commodity Origins, "The 2024 cocoa spike: why chocolate got expensive", https://commodityorigins.com/learn/the-2024-cocoa-spike/ (CC BY 4.0).