>Cocoa futures ended Thursday at $5,635 a metric ton, shooting past the old record of $5,368, which was set in July 1977. Bad growing weather in West Africa is to blame this time as well as then.
>Hot and dry weather in Ghana and the Ivory Coast bedeviled growers in the region last year and threaten the cocoa crop again this year, said Jack Scoville, futures-market analyst at Price Future Group.[0]
[0] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...
Cocoa is very elastic, so an 11% reduction in crop should not lead to a 300% increase in prices. The normal thing instead would for people to eat less chocolate until there is enough supply, with only minimal change in prices.
Instead there's something weird going on - tell me, would you buy a chocolate snack that costs 3 times as much as last year? Or would you buy a different snack instead?
>The normal thing instead would for people to eat less chocolate until there is enough supply
The cost of cocoa is not identical to the cost of chocolate.
>Based on a 200g milk chocolate bar costing €2, cocoa comprises around 10 percent of total costs; sugar 1 percent; milk products 6 percent; production, packaging and marketing and profits around 78 percent and tax 6 percent. [1]
This means a 3x increase in prices would make the bar cost €2.60. There are also products that use only small amounts of chocolate, reducing the total increase even further. For example the increase in chocolate costs in a chocolate chip cookie is negligible.
But my point is I believe the prices changes are driven by speculation, and not caused by supply fundamentals.