To the average shopper, rising prices have become just another feature of daily life. But for the observant sweet tooth, there’s one item on the shelves that’s climbing faster than many: chocolate. 

Cocoa prices more than quadrupled between 2022 and 2025, surging to historic highs of nearly $11,000 per metric ton — an unprecedented spike for a commodity at the heart of the $120 billion global chocolate industry.

The rally began after poor harvests in West Africa pushed prices to around $4,200 per ton by late 2023, a threshold not consistently seen since the 1970s.

And a new report forecasts that the negative trends fueling cocoa’s instability, from climate disruption to biodiversity loss, are likely to intensify through 2030 and beyond.

Europe’s chocolate supply chain is particularly exposed, the researchers warn. This is because nearly all of the EU’s cocoa imports come from West Africa, specifically Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria, all of which are countries ranked low in climate resilience.

In 2023 alone, 96.5 percent of the EU’s cocoa came from countries ranked “low-medium” in climate preparedness.

In other words, Europe’s sweet tooth is overwhelmingly fed by some of the most ecologically fragile parts of the planet.

“These aren’t just abstract threats,” said lead author Camilla Hyslop. “They are already playing out in ways that negatively affect businesses and jobs as well as the availability and price of food for consumers. And they are only getting worse.”

Many climate scientists attribute recent weather volatility primarily to El Nino, a phenomenon marked by unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific.

Rising temperatures

In 2023, parts of West Africa experienced exceptionally heavy rainfall, with precipitation levels exceeding twice the 30-year seasonal average in some regions.

By contrast, 2024 brought scorching heat and severe drought. According to scientists at World Weather Attribution, the humid heat wave around Easter was intensified by 4°C and made ten times more likely due to human-induced climate change.

El Nino is one of the driving forces.

“For the previous three years, we had La Nina conditions that sucked heat out of the atmosphere and stored it below the ocean’s surface, masking the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations,” says Michael McPhaden, an affiliate professor of oceanography at the University of Washington.

“With the current El Nino, that heat has come back out of the ocean to be redistributed around the globe and warm the whole planet.”

The link between climate change and the intensification of El Nino remains an active area of scientific inquiry. While researchers have yet to reach a clear consensus, emerging studies indicate that global warming may be contributing to more powerful El Nino events.

“Chocolate is just one of the many foods being made more expensive by climate change-driven extreme weather hitting crops,” says Amber Sawyer, analyst at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

Other commodities include coffee, soy, rice, wheat, and maize, which mostly originate in countries acutely vulnerable to environmental shocks.

“Until we reach net-zero emissions, these extremes will keep getting worse.”

But there are other price pressures which specifically affect the cocoa market. 

By the end of 2024, swollen shoot virus had infected about 20% of cocoa trees in Ivory Coast and 81 percent of trees in a major cocoa-producing region in Ghana, according to Tropical Research Services and the ICCO.

Black pod disease

A major disease of cocoa worldwide, black pod disease is characterised by the appearance of dark lesions on pods, which ultimately lead to rotting, which results in the reduction of plant yields.

The disease is known to cause yield losses of 20-30 percent annually and up to 90 percent in severe cases, with potential tree losses of up to 10 percent per year.

Prices for the chocolate ingredient roughly doubled in 2024, the following year, because of adverse weather and disease in top cocoa producers Ghana and Ivory Coast.

What to expect

Despite recent rains in West Africa, over a third of land in Ghana and the Ivory Coast remains gripped by drought, according to the African Flood and Drought Monitor.

At the same time, growing concerns over cocoa quality in the Ivory Coast have driven prices higher.

“70 percent of the world’s cocoa is produced by West African countries, 60 percent of which is made up by the Ivory Coast and Ghana,” futures and commodities expert Zafer Ergezen says.

Ergezen notes that declining cocoa quality, particularly in the Ivory Coast, has prompted major European chocolate manufacturers to raise concerns and reject some shipments, adding upward pressure on prices.