Chocolate egg surprise for Easter is price shock amid surge in cocoa costs

The world's growing love of chocolate means more expensive treats for the Easter holiday.

Demand was rising at the fastest pace in three years, said Euromonitor International, and farmers in West Africa are not growing enough cocoa to keep up. The cost of beans used to make chocolate reached a 30-month high last month, forcing confectioners to charge customers more.

Lucy Armstrong, who sells sweets online from Chichester, England, said the cost of a 10-kilogram pack of bulk chocolate she used to make champagne truffles, pralines and salty caramels surged 18 per cent this year to £59 (HK$770). She has raised the price of chocolate Easter eggs by 50 per cent from last year, just before demand picks up for the holiday on April 20, and she plans another increase in the next six months.

"It's definitely the first time where the chocolate has gone up quite noticeably," said Armstrong, who started Lucy Armstrong Chocolates three years ago and now charges £7.50 for a 170-gram Belgian milk-chocolate egg containing six hand-made chocolates, up from £5 last year. "It is hard to try [to] work out what you can sell and at what price. The problem is it's only going to go up and up and up."

Cocoa may rally to US$3,210 a tonne on ICE Futures US in New York by the end of December, the highest since July 2011, according to the average estimate of 14 traders and analysts surveyed. That would top this year's high of US$3,039, reached on March 17.

The US price of cocoa butter, the byproduct of crushed beans that accounts for 20 per cent of the weight of a chocolate bar, rose 86 per cent in the 12 months to April 11 and was the highest on average for any year since at least 1997, data from the Cocoa Merchants Association of America showed. The cost of other ingredients is also rising, after milk reached records this year in the United States and Europe and sugar futures rallied 20 per cent from a 43-month low in January.

While global bean production would rise for the first time in three years, reaching 4.1 million tonnes in the 12 months to September, that would be less than demand for a second year, with processors set to use 4.18 million tonnes, the International Cocoa Organisation in London said.