Oh Sugar! ‘What’s love got to do with it?’
Happy Valentine’s Day!
TINA Turner’s biggest selling single off her 1984 album Private Dancer tells us all “you must understand, though the touch of your hand makes my pulse react, that it’s only the thrill of boy meeting girl, opposites attract, it’s physical, only logical. You must try to ignore that it means more than that…What’s love, but a sweet old-fashioned notion, what’s love got to do with it, who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”
One of the most interesting fun facts about Valentine’s Day is that in the old days, doctors would recommend chocolate to people who were suffering from a broken heart or longing after a lost love.
Two chemicals, tryptophan and phenylethylamine, affect the brain’s pleasure and reward centres and chocolate is the agent that brings these two chemicals to the fore. These same chemicals are found in cacao beans used to make chocolate.
Ultimate forgiveness
Early history suggests evolution to Valentine’s Day, chocolate gifting is about how Saint Valentine forgave his jailer and restored sight to the jailer’s daughter. And just as love grows, so does the legend claiming he wrote a letter signed “Your Valentine” to the jailer’s daughter as a farewell right before his execution.
Celebrated annually on February 14, Valentine’s Day has become a significant cultural, religious, and increasingly commercialised celebration of romance and love around the world.
Tomorrow, Wednesday the 14th of February, spare a thought for those who have moved these Valentine’s
Day chocs through the supply chain to your local retailers so you may express your love for those you love and cherish.
Chocolate supply chain
Consider the supply chain for gifting chocolate to your Valentine.
There is an awful lot of work that goes into it with an eightstage production process and the upstream logistics of acquiring and transporting the graded beans to the factory and then getting it to the downstream retail outlets at the right time.
Occasions like Valentine’s Day bring added time pressures to the process.
This holds true whether you are a Cadbury, Whittaker’s, Hershey’s or one of the boutique local chocolate producers.
The supply chain is a network of upstream and downstream parties that produce value in the form of products and services.
This is where marketing and the supply chain intersect and sometimes are in conflict.
Marketing, viewed as a siloed function, is the management of the cliché of the four P’s — The right Product, at the right Price, the right Promotion, at the right Place at the right time.
Price of sugar
But there’s a storm blowing. Chocolate lovers can look forward to paying more and more at the checkout for your favourite indulgence for the foreseeable future, with the global price of two key ingredients cocoa and surprisingly, sugar likely to dramatically increase or remain at current high levels in the coming months according to Dutch food and agribusiness banking specialists Rabobank.
“Retail prices for sugar and chocolate have been climbing in recent months, as manufacturers around the world grapple with soaring input prices, especially cocoa, which has increased 27 per cent in price in the past year, and sugar, which has also been trading at record highs”, the bank said in a recent podcast ‘Sweet inflation and the Chocolate Factory’.
The Easter Bunny says Happy Valentine’s Day
The consumer goods industry, along with manufacturers and retailers it seems, are melting in the face of that pressure.
When the Easter Bunny, Easter Bilby in Australia, dominates major supermarket shelves weeks before Valentine’s Day, you have to wonder if someone turned Tina Turner’s pulsating rhythms of “what’s Love got to do with it”, into some kind of a marketing strategy to maximise profitability at the expense of loyal lovers and gifters of Valentine’s Day chocolate.
And for those who’d like to differentiate, it doesn’t appear to be simply a marketing campaign but more of a sugar-coated strategy around chocolate and events like Easter, Christmas, even Halloween, and indeed Valentine’s Day. When shelf-loads of Easter Bunny’s are arranged in a myriad of styles, sizes and flavours wishing you a Happy Valentine’s, you have to wonder.
Admittedly, a significant minority of the product choices is cross purpose and may be used equally for Valentine’s Day and other festive season chocolate giving. Is that where all this is headed? The supply chain, the high cost of sugar determining to an extent what romance looks like?
Sugar once the economic heart of the nation
It’s obvious the once economic heart of export dollar earnings in our nation is broken. It has to be scary for those whose livelihoods and lives depend on the sugar industry. But is the current climate good news for the daunting and what some, perhaps many, argue is the necessary revival of our sugar industry?
A January 2024 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute announced that the cost of sugar had surged to its highest level since 2011 after a long dry spell in India and drought in Thailand, and the price hike had already started to filter down to chocolate, sweets and other desserts. After Brazil, India and Thailand are the largest exporters of sugar.
2023 data on rising global temperatures is expected to be confirmed as the hottest year ever and correlates to continued fuelling of droughts and other extreme weather that affect food yields, including sugar.
“The issues in the production of sugar have been compounded by the threat of export limits from sugar-producing countries, to maintain their own stocks of the commodity, and port bottlenecks in Brazil, which have tied up exports.”
Referring to the periodic climatic event set to further accelerate global temperatures this year, the International Food Policy Research Institute reported, “There’s no question sugar prices are very, very high and will remain high until we see El Niño abate.”
Global shortfalls of sugar
Extreme weather events such as torrential rains and flooding have also been a driving factor behind the global shortfalls for sugar. Researchers warn that the current price shock under way with sugar is a reminder that previous assumptions about food production will have to be jettisoned.
The new norm is not post-COVID only, digitisation is not the only change we need to adapt to, and very, very quickly. Our sugar production has been optimised since the late 1800s for how the weather has been for the past hundreds of years. Not dissimilar to the digital transformation of our economy,
Just as getting our national digital strategy underway and done as a matter of urgency in the new paradigm of the rapid, ever-changing digital economy, increasingly volatile climate fluctuations and unpredictability, our sugar industry if there is a genuine desire to revive it, must adapt and develop strategies to cope with the relatively stable climate of the past - vanishing in front of our very eyes.
Sweet data at the Fiji Sugar Corporation
The past, it is said, can inform what you do in the future. The Fiji Sugar Corporation (FSC) should have vast amounts of data available in their computer systems going back to at least the early eighties.
The FSC had implemented mid-range mainframes from British computer company International Computers Ltd (ICL) and had their own programers and systems analysts and of course tonnes of data stored online and offline.
Data to assist the analysis of everything from soil assessments, cost optimisation, yield by farm, farmer, soil type, sugarcane quality, predictability, price, general accounting and financial management and so on.
You can only assume that the level of detail and sophistication of these databases would have improved significantly over the four decades or so. And so together with external data such as harvest season weather if not already being done, there is an opportunity to integrate, analyse and streamline the industry as a whole. The opportunity to integrate and harmonise FSC’s data potential to support its decision and policy making and monitor performance of crop, production and other efficiencies.
The future has already happened
The decline in food crops and sugar is not going to be gradual nor linear. We will be forced to cliff-dive into unpredictable and unknown waters. Consumers living on the poverty line and the marginals, the poor subsistence and sugarcane farmers will have their lives affected the most – the livelihoods of those already clutching at the last straw will be wiped out.
The future has already happened, and we have to allow the Easter Bunny to wish us a Happy Valentine’s Day. In Tina Turner’s words “I’ve been taking on a new direction, But I have to say I’ve been thinking about my own protection, it scares me to feel this way.”
■ NALEEN NAGESHWAR is a practicing data and digital transformation advisor and implementation consultant. His opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Fiji Times. For feedback and questions, contact: naleen@data4digital.com