Turkey Raised Its Hazelnut Price 28%. Your Chocolate Is More Complicated.

Turkey is bringing in what should be a much larger hazelnut crop this year. At almost the same moment, the Turkish government has raised the price its state buyer will pay for those hazelnuts by about 28%.

More nuts. Higher price.

That sounds backwards until you look at what the two numbers actually measure.

Turkey’s Grain Board, known as TMO, set its 2026/27 purchase price at 255 Turkish lira per kilogram for Giresun-quality hazelnuts and 250 lira for Levant-quality hazelnuts, assuming a 50% sound-kernel yield. Those figures are roughly 28% above last season’s levels in Turkish lira.

But the Turkish lira itself has moved. The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council calculates that the increase is closer to 9% when translated into U.S. dollars, putting the new TMO level near $5.25 per kilogram.

Already, our frightening 28% food-price increase has become something much smaller.

There is another distinction that matters even more. TMO is not posting the universal world price of a hazelnut. It is offering Turkish growers a government-backed purchase price. The program gives farmers an alternative buyer and creates a reference point beneath a market that might otherwise weaken as a large crop arrives.

And a large crop does appear to be arriving.

Industry estimates this summer put Turkey’s 2026/27 harvest around 804,000 to 810,000 metric tons. One widely circulated estimate put the previous crop at about 518,000 tons. OFI, one of the world’s large agricultural ingredient suppliers, also estimated that 150,000 to 175,000 tons could be carried into the new season.

That is a lot more hazelnut availability than the industry had a year ago. OFI consequently expected the open market to trade below the TMO purchase level for at least part of the season.

This is the odd little lesson hiding inside the headline. A government can raise what it is willing to pay farmers at the same time that underlying supply conditions are becoming less tight.

The reason Turkey can matter so much is that it sits at the center of the world hazelnut trade. Chocolate makers, confectioners and ingredient companies watch the Black Sea harvest closely even when their own products use nuts from somewhere else.

Last season shows why.

Turkey exported about 197,085 metric tons of hazelnuts during the 2025/26 season and collected roughly $2.51 billion for them. The prior season, exports had been about 309,064 tons with revenue of approximately $2.56 billion.

So export volume fell about 36%, yet export revenue barely moved.

Our calculation from those reported totals puts the average export value at roughly $12.73 per kilogram last season versus about $8.28 the season before, an increase of approximately 54%.

That is not a spot hazelnut price. The mix of grades, sizes, contracts and products exported can change from one year to another. It is useful for something else. It shows just how much value was being squeezed out of dramatically less physical product.

Processors entered this harvest having lived through that market.

Now supply is recovering, the state is supporting growers at a higher local-currency price, the currency is absorbing part of that increase, and buyers are working through inventories and contracts negotiated under very different conditions. None of those forces reaches a chocolate shop at exactly the same moment.

Which brings us to the chocolate.

Imagine a 100-gram confection containing 32 grams of hazelnut. At a 50% kernel yield, producing those 32 grams of usable nut would begin with roughly 64 grams of in-shell hazelnuts.

At $5.25 per kilogram, that amount of in-shell hazelnut represents about 34 cents of raw agricultural input.

If that dollar-denominated price rose 9%, the increase would be roughly three cents.

That is deliberately simplified arithmetic. Roasting, sorting, losses, transport, processing and quality premiums all matter. It is not a prediction of anyone’s manufacturing cost.

It does show why “hazelnuts are up 28%” cannot logically become “hazelnut chocolate should cost 28% more.”

There is another reason.

Not all hazelnuts are interchangeable.

Venchi’s classic Gianduiotto contains at least 32% hazelnuts, but they are PGI Piedmont Hazelnuts from the Langhe in Italy. The same Piedmontese nuts appear throughout much of Venchi’s traditional gianduia work.

They are not Turkish hazelnuts.

A huge Turkish crop can influence the broader economics of hazelnuts. Buyers can substitute origins in some applications. Global supply affects negotiating power. Ingredient companies notice relative prices.

But a confectioner committed to a specific protected origin is buying something more narrowly defined than “hazelnut.”

That distinction becomes particularly important in specialty food.

A commodity headline tells you what is happening to a broad ingredient market. It does not necessarily tell you what happened to the exact ingredient inside a particular jar, bar or gianduiotto.

The closer a maker gets to specifying variety, origin, grade, harvest, processing method and producer, the less useful the generic commodity price becomes as a complete explanation of the finished product.

This is also why food inflation can feel so maddeningly sticky. Agricultural markets can reverse direction months before you see the result at retail. A manufacturer may still be consuming expensive inventory. A distributor may have purchased at an earlier exchange rate. Packaging or freight may have moved the other way. A specialty producer may use an origin whose crop bears little resemblance to the global benchmark.

Turkey’s hazelnut story right now is actually encouraging from a supply standpoint. The new crop is substantially larger. Stocks are healthier. Buyers should have more product available to them.

The 28% figure does not contradict that.

It simply measures something different.

And the next time somebody tells you the price of chocolate has to move because the price of one ingredient just moved by X percent, there is a useful question to ask before accepting the arithmetic:

Which hazelnut?