Featured Image Credit: Antanas Tusla/Getty Images
Topics: UK Food
Ben Williams
Supermarket shelves are already filling with the familiar avalanche of festive chocolate, which all families want to stock their cupboards with, but people may have noticed a not-so-Christmassy trend.
This year, especially, the cost of living crisis has pushed some chocolate price tags too far: far enough into everyday favourites that even casual buyers are beginning to notice. Confectionery makers, both big and small, have spent months battling higher production costs, limited supplies, and shifting commodity markets, while customers have quietly wondered why the snacks they know so well suddenly feel less wallet-friendly.
Just beyond that uneasy feeling lies one of the most gutting twists we’ve seen among price hikes in a while: Maltesers are now, in some cases, more expensive per gram than sirloin steak.
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Reported by The Grocer, a 126g box of White Maltesers priced at £4 works out at £31.74 per kilo, nudging ahead of matured sirloin at £31.33 per kilo in Sainsbury’s. It’s the sort of comparison that sounds like a joke until you run the numbers, and they stack up.
The surge is rooted in a global cocoa shortage that has rocked the industry. Extreme weather across West Africa, combined with crop disease, slashed cocoa yields and sent wholesale prices soaring to unprecedented levels.
Oisin Hanrahan, chief executive of Keychain, summed up the situation plainly, as noted by The Times: “This price issue is a snowball effect from the past year. Extreme weather in west Africa last year has led to poor yields in countries like Ivory Coast, which is the world’s leading producer of cocoa, as well as diseases also hitting harvests."
Large brands have responded by reformulating recipes, reducing their reliance on costly cocoa butter and turning to cheaper fats. Smaller producers, however, have had less room to manoeuvre.
Giles Atwell of Russell & Atwell described the squeeze they’re under: “We’ve had to make savings elsewhere, like in our packaging and efficiencies, to offset these daunting increases. It’s a challenging time for small-batch makers like us, who are determined to uphold quality without pricing ourselves out of reach."
For some in the artisan world, the pressures have become overwhelming. Chloe Oswald of Chocolatia has seen competition for cocoa intensify sharply, saying: “The real problem has been inflation and bigger chocolate companies buying beans in bulk, causing the prices for the remaining beans to skyrocket."
Eventually, she made the difficult decision to pause production, adding: “It’s a bit of an unorthodox decision, but at one point it was costing me more to actually make chocolates than it was to keep the business… So we decided now was the right time to start a family and come back to chocolate when the prices have settled down."