Halloween nightmare: The high cost of cocoa is a fear for candy buyers

The price of chocolate can make you feel bad about buying sweets.

Instead of filling buckets with copious amounts of chocolate, kids will go home with gummies and more fruit-flavored treats and tarts.

Cocoa prices are rising, prompting companies to shift gears from chocolate confections this season to candy-centric ones.

“We’re going to see a lot of new creations — gummy and Twizzler-themed Halloween snacks and other types of non-chocolate confections — hitting stores to capture that sales growth at a lower price,” David Branch, an analyst of goods. for the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, told the Washington Post.

And while chocolate still leads the candy category, people are showing more interest in gummy, fruity and tart candies, said Sally Lyons Wyatt, chief consumer packaged goods advisor at Circana.

Mars, the candy giant that makes brands such as Skittles and M&M’s, told CNN it has expanded its Halloween candy and gummy options thanks to increased interest from Gen Z and younger consumers.

“Consumers are buying less than they might have in the past, but chocolate is still a top-selling category,” Lyons Wyatt said. “Halloween will still have chocolate showing up at customers’ doors.”

These candy options may offer more flavor and variety than chocolate, but it’s also cheaper.

Cocoa prices have more than doubled since the start of the year and are staying at their highs due to three years of poor cocoa harvests, with a fourth expected, as major African cocoa factories in the Coast Ivory Coast and Ghana have either stopped or stopped processing because they cannot afford to buy beans. The cocoa producing regions of West Africa produce over 70% of global production cocoa supply.

“Cocoa is not like a normal agricultural crop where you grow it everywhere, like other commodities. It takes a very specific area and temperature range to grow,” David Branch, sector manager at the Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute, told CNN.

Chocolate major Hershey was the only one forced to come to terms with rising prices: Heshey president Michele Buck said in a phone call in August that cocoa prices are “unsustainable” — though the company told CNN that price increases won’t change prices. Halloween items this year.

In August, Hershey reported an operating profit of $287.8 million — a 48.7% drop from last year.

However, with the weather improving, prices for chocolate are looking up – or rather down – with experts predicting that prices will eventually drop, but not until at least September 2025, in time for next year’s Halloween.

“So far we’ve had really good weather for this year’s crop,” Branch said. “It will start to help increase supply, so we expect prices to come down.”

Meanwhile, chocolate companies are trying to overcome the hurdle so chocolate isn’t completely unaffordable, including making smaller products or changing the overall taste by replacing a layer of chocolate with a different flavor or texture, such as a wafer. nuts or fillings.

“Maybe there’s a shrink in these bags,” Branch said. “You get a two-pound bag of a mix of all these different candies from one company. Well, this bag will probably be less than two pounds now at the same price.”

Lyons Wyatt added, “There have been (products) that can be filled with something other than wrapped in chocolate, because then you don’t have to have as much chocolate to make that product.”

Although with prices not expected to drop until the end of 2025, retailers, manufacturers and consumers are sure to all feel the effects.

“The main role that candy plays is the treat and the reward,” Lyons Wyatt told WaPo. “[But] price has been one of the biggest obstacles.”