High cost of cheap chocolate: Amid cocoa crisis, prices surge in mass-produced low-quality chocolate

Cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast, the world’s biggest cocoa producer, are struggling as climate change and plant diseases have hurt harvests in recent years. As mass-produced chocolate prices surge in supermarkets and chain stores, our guest Chocolate Maker Mikkel Frils-Holm has surprisingly not been adversely affected by the cacao crisis. Prior to the chocolate crisis, the high-quality cacao he uses generally cost about 3-4 times as much as his mass-producing colleagues.” And so he sees the surge in prices mainly affecting the “cheap chocolate in the supermarkets.”