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I'm joined in the studio today by chocolate covered pretzels. They're my favorite chocolate snack, and I've brought them with me today because right now the world is in the grips of a coco crisis. The global supply of coco has plummeted and prices are at an all time high.
I mean, we're going to get in trouble. We see it coming.
Jacques Torres is a chocolateear based in New York. You might recognize him as a judge on the cheeky baking competition show Nailed It, where they nod to his bubbly and very French approach.
The judge that knows the fudge Monsieur Jaquestrres.
He's the owner of Jacques Torres Chocolate, one of the pioneers of artisanal bean to bar chocolate. The company is still known best for one of the very first treats Torres served, hot chocolate. He got the flash of inspiration for the signature product when he tried a cup of American style hot chocolate. It was nothing like what he grew up with in France.
I'm from the south of France, and when you want to hot chocolate, it's there. They make hot chocolate starting from chocolate chocolate. Do they really they make the real thing?
Torres thought, I will introduce America to real hot chocolate made with actual chocolate, no cocoa powder. People will love it.
Nobody wanted, adult was telling me. So I start to give it away every weekend. I do. I don't know how many, how many containers of hot chocolates, and I give it away until people start to say, you know what, it's actually good.
The hot chocolate caught on, and twenty five years after the company's creation, Torres is still selling that super thick hot chocolate, along with everything from bon bonds to chocolate bunnies to bars.
About one hundred tons for this year. My guess, I don't know bars is that WA's over ten thousand.
That's a lot chocolate chocolate that's getting more expensive to make by the day. And in order to survive, Torres is faced with some tough choices like should he raise his prices?
But it's a risk because people might not buy it, you know what I mean? I don't know what solution we have.
Torres is in this situation because of events unfolding thousands of miles away in the cocoa farms of West Africa, where dyeing crops and drinking harvests have turned cocoa into an increasingly hot commodity. Bloomberg correspondent Mumby Gatou has been following the story.
Now speaking to a chocolate to make a wild buck, and he said, maybe instead of buying cold people should be buying coco.
Today on the show, We've Got a Chocolate problem. Extreme weather and a deadly fungus have killed millions of cocoa plants, and now everyone from farmers to chocolate makers are scrambling to survive. In many ways, the very future of chocolate is at state.
We have to pay the farmer, We have to give them support. Otherwise the next generation of chef will not have chocolates.
We track the cocoa crisis from the farms of Ghana to the chocolate factories of New York on a journey from bean to bar to pretzel. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. My bag of chocolate covered pretzels costs four ninety, but pretty soon it could cost even more. Right now, cocoa is trading at an all time high more than ten thousand dollars a ton, that's about five dollars a pound this time last year,
it costs just over a dollar a pound. This is all happening because of what's going on in West Africa, where most of the cocoa in the world is grown.
Precisely, we get seventy five percent of a cocoa supply from Justusta.
Mumbiguitao has been covering the cocoa story for Bloomberg and the.
Top producers in that region are Ivory Coast in Ghana, and their production has fallen quite a lot in the current season.
Just how low is that supply?
For what we have on record from Ivory Coast, production is expected to fall by twenty five percent. Twenty five percent is a huge number.
And as supply has fallen, prices have soared. Cocoa prices have more than doubled in just the last few months, like.
A rocket launch. That has just been a vatical rise in the prices.
Cocoa is a hard plant to cultivate. It's fussy and only grows in a handful of places in the world. The plants take years to produce, cocoa pods, and when they do reach maturity, they're prone to disease. But over the last few years, growing cocoa has gotten even harder as extreme weather events have hammered West Africa.
Not a very good combination for coco moving from an extreme of heavy rains to a next stream of dryness. We've also had diseases like swollen shoe that infects are plant.
You mentioned that disease that's been killing off a lot of cocoa plants, swollen shoot. Can you say more about what that disease does and why it's so destructive.
If you've seen a coco tree, it produces pods that are the size of a rugby ball, and it's shaped in an oval shape. So when a tree is infected, those pods start to fall, the tree starts to turn black and gray and it doesn't produce anymore. And the problem with swollen shoe is that once one tree is infected, it starts to infect the rest of the trees in
that plantation. So it starts to spread in just not one farmer's plantation, but the next farmer could have the same issue, and the next farmer will have the same issue, and the only way to eradicate it is by appruiting trees.
Up rooting trees. That also means planting new ones, new ones, which could take up to five years to start bearing parts. In the meantime, the harvest out of countries like the Ivory Coast and Ghana have gotten smaller and smaller.
Ghana have I started dropping and we are headed for a twenty year low.
Eco Danto covers Coco for Bloomberg out of Acra, Ghana. He says, the coco farmers he's spoken with are really struggling.
I say, Charlie, I've lost hope. Look at the trees. I've invested everything. I've spent my money, getting liberals and put a whole thing in place. But here you are the range one of four that you watch everything wither or away, and you are helpless.
You might think the soaring price of cocoa would be benefiting farmers, even if they're producing less, their cocoa is worth a lot more, But that isn't happening. In Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The government dictates the price of coco. Farmers get a fixed amount for their beans, so even as cocoa price is sore, the farmers aren't the ones making that extra money.
Farmers have been earning the same amount they've been earning for such a long time, and you can imagine the cost of living crisis that we've seen, the inflation that we've seen in the last cacolovias. Yet farmers have been earning the same That means they've not been able to invest back into the firms. They've not been able to afford fertilizes, chemicals, everything that is needed to make sure that a tree continues producing as much as it can produce.
So some have resulted in abandoning their farms. Some have gone into other crops that they think are more profitable.
Others have sold off their land to speculators who are hunting for gold deposits beneath the cocoa trees. Ghana reporter Ecodonto spoke with Francis Giabeg about his situation. Giabang is a farmer. He sixty four, has eight children. He owns a cocoa farm in southwestern Ghana. He spoke with Echo by phone. He's telling Echo that the crop disease was intense and this year's drought was long. With the scorching sun He says he's no benefit from high cocoa crisis
and his cocoa pods are withered and dead. Echo has spoken with many farmers and says when it comes to cocoa, things might get worse before they get better.
Future of cocoa is bleak in this country. I expect that in the next five years will be operating just about maybe half a million tons for some time until all those disease farms are rehabilitated.
When we come back, how the cocoa shortage is flowing from the farms of Ghana up the supply chain to chocolate makers. Really real?
Oh no, no, this is real. I mean we're going to get in trouble.
That's after the break. We're back. We've been talking about the global cocoa crisis and its origin in the cocoa farms of Western Africa. Now these issues are flowing up the go supply chain to places like this.
So you come with me, You go through the door. You guys can go to the shoe clearer.
Okay, I assure you do that.
Oh it smells amazing. This is Jacques Torres's chocolate factory in Brooklyn, New York. It is vast Torres zips around on a scooter from the Bonbond decorating room to the chocolate sculpting room to the chocolate cookie room and connecting them all a network of white pipes running along the ceiling.
We have a forty thousand squaffee chocolate manufacture that are going to show you around.
And what are we hearing right now?
So there is a lot of different pumps going on and pushing the chocolates. The problem with the chocolates in those pipes. And you see the pipes on the ceiling, and all those pipes have chocolate running through.
Them, pipes full of chocolate. I know what you're thinking, Where's the chocolate river?
What is the chocolate river?
That would be the chocolate river from the classic film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
What do you Monca is completely fake. I am the rear feed.
But working in chocolate isn't as sweet as it used to be. Cocoa prices are on Torres's mind all the time.
I'm tired of it. I don't want the business side anymore. I want to do what I love to do, to make chocolate, to eat chocolate, to drink our chocolate I'm not about the money. I'm more of a craftman.
But with cocoa costs more than double what they were just a few months ago, there's no ignoring the money part. How often are you checking the price every day? First thing when you wake up?
Yes, on my computer and I check prices.
Torres doesn't even get most of his cocoa from West Africa, but the cocoa shortage there has created global supply chain issues and spike the price of cocoa everywhere. That means cocoa prices are seeping into Torres's world of pure imagination in a big way. He might have to pay four time is what he paid for cocoa last year, but he can't quadruple the price of his chocolates. Customers are sensitive even to small price sikes instant.
We lose costumer right either way. And it's interesting sometimes I'm thinking, you know what we're going to rate to put another twenty five cents there, and nobody going to see the difference. People know the price of things, so it's dangerous to go with it to be too high in price or too fast, because then you lose customer.
All of this makes the Wonka business pretty tough producers like Torres tend to have a reserve of cocoa, so higher prices don't affect them immediately, But Torres says by the end of the year the math is going to get really hard. About a quarter of the cost of Torres's chocolate bars come from cocoa, and if he can't pass those rising costs onto the consumers, he has to start taking a look at the product itself. Would you ever change your chocolate recipe?
No, The only way to change your recp is to put less quality kakel beans or most sugar, so more sugar will not I can't. I mean, it's it's not who we are, it's not how we develop the company. It's not how do we develop how do we develop our name? So no, I will not change that. It's that's too important. Cannot touch that.
Some of the big chocolate makers are already changing their recipes, putting a little less chocolate in their chocolate or making their products smaller shrinkflation. But that won't work for a smaller scale producer like Torres. He says, his customers would notice, But also the molds themselves are expensive, and buying all new ones would be a major cost for him. That leaves one last option filling the chocolates with more extra stuff.
If you do a chocolate bar with almonds, then one third of the chocolate is going to be removed to fill the almonds. So one of the solutions that we are looking at is, okay, what is less expensive than cakeo a ten thousand dollars ton. So if almonds became less expensive than cacao, we're going to put a little bit more almonds, a little bit less chocolates, so people or customer, we get the same chocolate bar, the same weight, no shrinkage. So that's maybe a solution for us.
Torres and his team are experimenting with adding more nuts and fruits to their chocolate bars. They're also thinking up new products. Price spikes and shortages are nothing new for chocolate tears. Torres says, during World War Two, Italian chocolate makers couldn't get their hands on much coco, so they started to adapt.
So what the Italian? What the Italian?
Did?
They come up with this recipe? This is a jam douya juma.
Coco might have been hard to come by for the Italians, but there were lots and lots of hazelnut trees.
So what do they do. They used the hazel nuts that they have in Pimo and they mix it with chocolates and they make a bombon with it.
The hazelnut chocolates became hugely, as did another product created out of that moment, Nutella.
So those products was born.
So we may get a new nutella because.
Maybe we will.
We will look at it.
And he's hoping to bring some of that old school innovation to this moment to help him adapt to soaring cocoa prices. Right now, nothing is off the table, not even his beloved hot chocolate, the product that started it all. He bruised me a cup. It's made of crushed up chocolate. It's been his signature product for twenty five years. We use real chocolate, it says on the tin, never cocoa powder. But that famous cocoa might have to change. Already a
fourteen ounce container costs about twenty five dollars. Charging more could be tricky, so instead Torres might have to rethink the mix.
If I have to, I will replace twenty percent of the powder, maybe with a mixture of caca went sugar to not lose the flavor, but helping us with the price. I don't know what I'm going to do or do I just tell Costumer just more expensive. But it's a risk because people might not buy it, you know. I mean, I don't know what solution we have.
Does it make you sad that you might have to change the ratios? No?
Look again, in life, you do what you have to do. So I don't going to put something on the market that's not good. If I don't like it, I don't make it. I am very stubborn about it.
In the meantime, Torres is doing everything he can to try and avoid making some of the more painful changes. He's been making deals with cocoa farmers to try and lock down future supply.
We're also waiting. I don't want to change everything because it may be on the way down.
Torres is still holding out hope that somehow prices will go down and he'll be able to keep his signature drink just as it is pure melted chocolate, very hot.
Okay, so be careful. That would sick.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press, Jessica Beck, and Alex Sugiura. It was edited by Stacy Vanicksmith and Jeff Sutherland. It was mixed by Ben O'Brien. It was fact checked by Adrianna Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. The Cold Beemster bor is Our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Thanks for listening. Please follow and review The Big Take
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