Tony’s Chocolonely has urged rival chocolate brands not to lower their prices as cocoa costs continue to fall from their 2024 peak.
“Chocolate is a luxury product; it shouldn’t be cheap, because when it is cheap, the people at the start of the supply chain are paying the price,” Nicola Matthews, UKI head of marketing at Tony’s, told The Grocer.
Supermarket chocolate prices were up by 18.4% year on year by the end of 2025, according to Kantar data, after a shortage of cocoa from West Africa triggered a rally on the commodity, which hit a peak in the spring of 2024 [52 w/e 30 November 2025].
Around 70% of global cocoa is produced in West Africa, but the region suffered a poor 2023/24 harvest due to extreme weather conditions, disease and ageing trees.
To mitigate the impact, suppliers including Mondelez, Mars Wrigley and Lindt put up the prices of their chocolate – as did Tony’s.
However, commodity prices have since fallen significantly. Cocoa bean futures traded on the London ICE exchange stood at £2,750 per tonne on 10 February, down 64.6% year on year, and 72.9% on the record £10,137 price registered on 19 April 2024.
The cost of the cocoa products most crucial for chocolate production has fallen by an even bigger level. Price reporting agency Expana’s benchmark cocoa butter price was down 76.2% year on year to €6,321 per tonne last week, and by 83.7% on the peak €38,702 per tonne price seen on 24 April 2024.
Cocoa liquor (mass) prices, meanwhile, have slid by 71.5% year on year to €4,954 per tonne, and by 80.2% compared with the top of the market in April 2024.
And yet, chocolate prices remain elevated in the mults. The average month-on-month base price of a Cadbury Dairy Milk 95g-110g tablet, for instance, is flat at £1.98 across the traditional big four, Waitrose, Aldi and Lidl [Assosia 52 w/e 16 February 2026].
“The way cocoa is bought, 12 months in advance, means there’s always going be a bit of a lag,” explained Matthews. “So, any changes in cocoa now won’t be reflected in chocolate prices for at least a year.”
Playing the long game
Even so, Matthews urged chocolate suppliers not to “focus on short-term price adjustments, because sustainable pricing supports the farmers and the future of the cocoa industry”.
“We’ve put the prices up now, and if companies have proven they can sustain their business models at that level, then that’s just creating a little bit of extra gap in their value chain so they could sustain paying cocoa farmers more.”
Earlier this month, Tony’s launched a Valentine’s Day-themed campaign calling for allies to commit to its five cocoa sourcing principles in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.
The ethical chocolate brand placed full-page “personal ads” in newspapers including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times stating it was “looking for long-time lovers… ready to commit to paying cocoa farmers a higher price”.
In a LinkedIn post it asked chocolate companies: “Have we wooed you yet?” and included a link to more information about its Open Chain initiative.
“Over the last seven years, we’ve been trying loads of different ways to get the attention of potential long-term partners,” said Matthews.
“We thought, this Valentine’s Day, over a year into such a volatile cocoa market, what if we leant into that more tongue-in-cheek way, that doesn’t just reach the people we’re trying to convince, which is the brands that source cocoa, but also reaches consumers and retailers.”
Tony’s last week launched its debut TV campaign ‘There’s Fight in Every Bite’ after securing £500k worth of Sky Media advertising through the Sky Zero Footprint Fund.
Live across Sky channels until 6 April, the ad introduces two wrestlers, Tony and X-Ploitation. Both battle it out in the background as two women sit on a sofa discussing exploitation in the chocolate industry, while tucking into a Tony’s Chocolonely tablet.
Cocoa in crisis
Cocoa prices surged in 2024 due to “structural deficiencies” in the world’s key cocoa-producing region in West Africa, said Expana senior manager for cocoa analysis Andrew Moriarty.
The cocoa swollen shoot virus (CSSV) had “spread unchecked for years, reducing yields”, Moriarty added. High fertiliser prices, coupled with low cocoa prices prior to 2024 and growth in other activities such as illegal mining or farming alternative crops, had meant farmers had also “largely ignored farm maintenance that could boost yields and also prevent the spread of CSSV”.
This has eroded production in West Africa, and led to several consecutive years of global deficits where demand outpaced supply, he pointed out.
Prices started to fall after the April 2024 peak on the back of a rise in production, primarily in Latin America, with Ecuador now the world’s second-largest grower.
However, the impact of high commodity prices had, by late 2024, “trickled down to retail level”, Moriarty explained. This “eroded consumer demand which has weakened consistently since the start of 2025”, and demand “remains weak as most chocolate ingredients on shelves today were bought at elevated levels back in the first half of 2025”.
The industry now expected surpluses to grow, however “demand remains weak, and the main question now is if or when consumer demand actually recovers – likely later this year”, Moriarty said.
“The majority of the industry expect to see some further easing of prices from current levels,” he added. And if prices did drop much further, “this could finally incentivise more manufacturers to start extending their cover; they have largely stayed on the sidelines for about nine months now, so some added buying would also provide some support to price movements going forward”.
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