Climate disasters have nearly quadrupled cocoa prices, forcing some chocolatiers to close
Saskatchewan's chocolatiers face a cocoa conundrum: raise their prices or reduce size
Tammy Maki says she's never seen prices for cocoa quite this high.
And that's part of the reason why the chef and owner of Raven Rising-Global Indigenous Chocolates has decided to close her business — the other reasons including the recent Canada Post strike that delayed shipments, the threat of tariffs from the United States and a staffing shortage.
"Last year, chocolate pricing rose, for us, 90 per cent over the course of the year," Maki said. "The last 45 per cent of that was right before our busiest time. Forty-five per cent is no small feat for a small business."
Maki, who ran her business on White Bear First Nation, about 215 kilometres southeast of Regina, said before deciding to close, she considered making her products smaller to reduce the rising costs.
"If I lower a chocolate bar by 10 grams in order to help me have some sort of profit margin, then that's what I have to do," she said. "Pricing will only bear what the consumer is willing to pay for your product."
Because people don't consider chocolate a necessity, Maki says, the rising prices cost her customers, including corporate clients.
The price hike is due to a shortage of cocoa from farms in major cocoa-producing countries in West Africa. A series of climate disasters, including floods and drought, have ruined crops in recent years.
According to United Kingdom charity Christian Aid, cocoa prices have risen 400 per cent in recent years as a result.
Graham Gordon, Christian Aid's head of global advocacy and policy, says the disasters can be attributed to climate change.
"They're more extreme and they're more frequent due to climate change, even though you can't attribute, necessarily, a single event due to climate change," Gordon said. "But these have been tracked over the last 10 or 20 years and you can see the increase in intensity and frequency."
Better sustainability practices needed
Sophia Carodenuto, an associate professor of geography at the University of Victoria, says this year's cocoa harvest is expected to be somewhat back to normal.
But she said most cocoa farms are small-scale operations and most profits from chocolates don't usually reach farmers themselves, preventing them from having the resources to adapt to climate change.
"They are not able to invest in their farms to regenerate their [cocoa] trees, have more productive trees that are planted, or fight the disease and viruses that are affecting the tree," Carodenuto said.
She says cocoa farming itself contributes to climate change through deforestation — which can change rainfall patterns — and degrading soil through the use of pesticides and fertilizers.
"We're seeing that the land is really unable to continue to produce at the rate that we've seen in the past," she said.
Carodenuto and some of her students recently took a trip to Belize, another cocoa-producing country, to see the effects of recent wildfires. They noticed how crops protected by the shade of trees were spared from the flames.
"We're hoping that through awareness raising and planting more[non-cocoa] trees on farms, that can lead to a more sustainable approach to [cocoa] production," she said.
Sask. climate affects chocolate production
Faye Moffatt has also seen similar cocoa price increases at her shop, River Layne Chocolate Couture, in Saskatoon.
"In 2023, it was about $3,300 a tonne and now it's up to about $10,000 to $12,000 a tonne," Moffatt said.
Moffatt says Saskatchewan poses its own climate challenges for her work. Increasingly hot summer days can cause her chocolate confections to melt, especially when they are being shipped.
"On weeks where it's in the highs 20s or 30s C we tend to not ship our chocolate, unless our client really wants it and we'll put ice packs in," Moffatt said. "But there are definitely times where we just have to slow our shipping."
Both Moffatt and Maki say the hot temperatures are extending further into spring and fall, meaning ice packs and air conditioning have to be used more frequently, driving up costs further.
Moffatt says even though cocoa can't be produced in Canada, she's trying to buy equipment and other items for her shop locally to support the Canadian economy, while hopefully saving some money.
Maki says she is working on diversifying her business to offer more than just chocolate, and is in the process of figuring out a launch date.
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