A single square of dark chocolate on a brass scale beside a heap of dried cocoa beans, a broken cacao pod and a handwritten column of figures on a scrap of paper, in low warm light

Cocoa Is Cheap and Terrified at the Same Time, and Neither Fact

September 10, 2026

The Pantry Pulse, 10 September 2026.

The cocoa market spent this week believing two things that cannot both be comfortable. On Wednesday the futures price slipped below $5,900 a tonne, its lowest in two weeks, because the exchange warehouses that hold certified beans are fuller than they have been in two years and Ivory Coast has shipped 19 percent more cocoa to its ports this season than last. On the same day, Ghana's state marketing company was saying the country's next harvest could fall by as much as 38 percent, nearly twice the decline it had estimated before. The near term is awash. The next crop is in trouble. And if you buy chocolate from a small maker, neither of those facts is the reason your bar costs what it costs.

What happened this summer

The story since June has been weather. On June 10 Japan's meteorological agency confirmed that El Niño conditions had formed in the Pacific, and on July 8 the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said the event would likely be one of the strongest in more than 75 years. El Niño tends to bring hot, dry weather to West Africa, where Ivory Coast and Ghana grow more than half the world's cocoa, and the last strong one, in 2023 and 2024, was the reason cocoa touched an all-time high of $12,906 a tonne in December 2024, in a market that had spent the previous two decades between $2,000 and $3,000.

Traders priced the risk in fast. By Bloomberg's count, London futures rose more than 70 percent from early June to the start of September, when they touched their highest level in a year. What drove them was not only the forecast but what field surveys were finding on the ground: heavy rain and cloud through the summer that favored black pod disease, floods that damaged young pods and washed away trees, and, in a late-August survey of five traders and pod counters, an estimate that Ivory Coast's coming crop could fall by about a fifth, to 1.75 million tonnes. Ghana's decline was put at 13 percent in August; the 38 percent figure its marketing company gave this week cited disease, aging trees and what it called unusual pollination failures. The forecasting house StoneX cut its estimate of next season's global surplus to 25,000 tonnes at the end of July, from 149,000 tonnes in April, which is close enough to zero that a bad harvest turns it into a deficit.

Why the price fell anyway

Because the shortage is next year's and the surplus is this year's. The 2025/26 crop was large, and its beans are still arriving: exchange inventories reached 3.44 million bags this month, a two-year high, and Barry Callebaut, the world's largest cocoa processor, said the market is well supplied and better placed to absorb a shock than it was in 2023. Demand has also been weak, since two years of expensive chocolate taught shoppers to buy less of it. So the price does what a market does when it is torn: it rallies on the forecast, then eases on the warehouse report, and lands somewhere in the middle. On Wednesday that somewhere was $5,937, about 20 percent below a year ago and roughly double the old normal.

The next test comes on October 1, when Ivory Coast opens its main-crop season and sets the price it pays farmers, and through the autumn as the first pod counts from the new harvest arrive. If the El Niño delivers the dry season the models expect, the surplus disappears and the summer's rally resumes. If it does not, the warehouses win. Nobody who is honest claims to know which.

The market structure

The commodity cocoa market has four moving parts. Growers, mostly in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, sell to state or state-adjacent buyers: Ghana’s Cocoa Marketing Company, a subsidiary of the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod), buys most Ghanaian production at the price the board sets before each season, and Côte d’Ivoire’s Conseil du Café-Cacao plays the equivalent role there. Those two boards, together, price the beans behind roughly 60 percent of the world crop, per the International Cocoa Organization.

From the boards, beans flow to processors and traders. Barry Callebaut (SIX: BARN), the Swiss group that describes itself as the world’s largest cocoa and chocolate manufacturer in its own annual report, is the biggest single processor; Cargill and Olam Food Ingredients handle most of what Barry Callebaut does not. These three price the physical trade against the futures market run by ICE, whose New York contract and its London counterpart set the reference price the boards, the processors and every craft maker on our shelf watch.

Craft makers are the small end. They buy fine-flavor beans directly from specific cooperatives, on multi-year contracts that price on quality rather than on the ICE screen. Dandelion, Dick Taylor and Amano all publish their pay rates in transparency reports; those rates run at multiples of the exchange, which is the reason the arithmetic later in this piece works out the way it does.

What it does to a bar

Here is the part the market reports never get to. Take a two-ounce craft bar at 70 percent cacao, the standard size from the makers on our shelf. It contains about 40 grams of cacao, which took about 45 grams of dried beans to make once the shells were winnowed off. At Wednesday's price, those beans cost 27 cents. At the twenty-year norm of $3,000 a tonne they cost 14 cents. At the December 2024 record they cost 58 cents.

Craft makers do not pay the exchange price. They buy fine-flavor beans directly from specific farms and cooperatives, and the transparency reports several of them publish show prices at multiples of the commodity figure, because they are paying for careful fermentation and for the farmer to stay in business. The table below assumes three times the exchange price, and the arithmetic is easy to redo at any other multiple. The beans in a craft bar cost about 80 cents today, about 40 cents in the old normal, and about $1.75 at the peak of the worst cocoa crisis in the market's history.

Cocoa price per tonne	Beans in a 2 oz, 70% bar, at exchange price	At a craft premium of three times exchange
$3,000 (the 2005 to 2023 norm)	$0.14	$0.41
$5,937 (9 September 2026)	$0.27	$0.80
$12,906 (record, December 2024)	$0.58	$1.74

A craft bar sells for ten to fourteen dollars. The bean is a dollar of that, and it was two dollars at the very worst. Everything else is the work our process piece describes: sorting by hand, roasting to a profile built for one farm, days in a stone melanger, tempering, molding, wrapping, and the small batches that make all of it expensive per bar. That is why craft chocolate held its price through the crisis while mass-market makers shrank bars and, in many cases, replaced cocoa butter with cheaper palm-based fats, and why craft bars will not get cheaper now that cocoa has come down. The commodity market is the price of a raw material. The craft bar is the price of a craft.

The cost that does move

There is one place a fine food shop feels the market, and it is not the bean. It is the farmer. Ghana and Ivory Coast both cut the official price they pay growers this year, Ghana by nearly 30 percent in February and Ivory Coast by 57 percent for the mid-crop, after the futures fell from the record. Bloomberg's reporting from a farm in southwest Ghana this month found a grower who could not afford the pesticides that stop black pod, watching it blacken his crop; paid less, farmers spend less on the trees, and the pods show it. The makers who buy directly and pay a premium are insulating a few hundred farms from that cycle; our fermentation piece explains why the most skilled work in chocolate is done by the people with the least power in it. When you pay for a craft bar, that premium is where a meaningful share of the extra dollars goes.

On the shelf

The bars to read this story through are the ones whose makers publish what they pay. Dandelion's Maya Mountain comes from a Belizean cooperative that ferments centrally and prices by quality rather than by the exchange; our producer guide covers its sourcing reports. Amano's Ocumare is Venezuelan cacao that never touched the West African market at all. Dick Taylor's Fleur de Sel is a two-ingredient bar from beans bought the same way, with salt. Their prices are on the product pages, and the point of the table is that those prices were set by the work rather than by the exchange; all three are on the chocolate shelf at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Watch October 1. Then watch the pod counts. Then buy the bar you were going to buy anyway, because its price was never on the exchange.

Sources & Further Reading

Disclosure. Three chocolate makers named in this piece are on our shelf: Dandelion, Dick Taylor and Amano. We buy from each through their normal wholesale terms and stock several bars from each; the specific bars linked above were in stock on the day this piece went up. We have no other financial interest in the outcome of cocoa prices, in any of the processors named, or in the boards that set the farmgate price.

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