A look at why the world of chocolate is in crisis
The world of chocolate is facing such immense cocoa shortages that the wild trading lured an unlikely player: Pierre Andurand, a hedgefund manager best known for his bets on oil.
By early March, prices had already more than doubled in just a 12-month span. At that point, many speculators were calling it quits and slashing their bullish wagers. That’s when Andurand saw an opportunity to go long.
The signs were all there for a massive deficit: the world had enjoyed chocolate on the cheap for decades, trees were older and crop disease was rampant in the West African countries that supply about half the market. A bit of bad weather was the tipping point for output from Ivory Coast and Ghana, with many traders now fearing production in the growers has entered a long-term retreat. Futures quickly surged about 70% from the start of March to a record this week.
For the world’s chocolate makers, the crisis is here. Plants have been forced to shutter from Malaysia to Germany and Chicago. Firms that were caught on the wrong end of the rally are getting snarled in lawsuits. And now, a lack of liquidity also means that the market’s next stage is likely to be riddled with erratic price moves that raise the specter of company failures.
“The scars of this crisis may long be visible in cocoa’s volatility,” said Tristan Fletcher, chief executive officer at ChAI, a platform that uses AI to analyze commodity markets. “Speculative players are coming in and out of positions much more rapidly, which will add to this choppiness. This means that the markets are much more likely to swing violently.”
Commodities markets are notoriously volatile, but the speed and severity of the rally in cocoa has caught out even seasoned market players and triggered chaos across the global supply chain for the crop, from struggling West African farmers to European commodity brokers to U.S. candy manufacturers.
This week, futures reached a record $10,760 a metric ton, a level that would’ve previously been unthinkable for most traders and is about double the previous peak set in the 1970s. Before this rally, the New York market had largely remained below $3,500 since the 1980s.
Citigroup Inc. sees prices climbing to as high as $12,500 in the next few months. Andurand has forecast futures to break $20,000 this year.
The torrid pace of the increases has driven out scores of investors who don’t want to get caught flat-footed. And more importantly, many can no longer afford to trade — the cost for margin calls to back a firm’s position has skyrocketed.
Trading of cocoa futures has reached historically low levels, with a measure of the amount of outstanding contracts slipping to the lowest in 12 years. The market is now stuck between extreme crop shortages and dangerously low liquidity.
“It is the lack of physical activity — confined only to desperate covering of nearby physical contracts — that has caused the drying up of their normal futures activity, reducing the liquidity,” said Pam Thornton, a veteran commodity trader at Nightingale Investment Management, who’s best known for her role at former cocoa hedge fund Armajaro Asset Management. “So if you have to buy futures, you can easily move the market very quickly.”
When firms can’t pay margin calls to back up their hedges, they are forced to buy futures back, sending prices even higher and pushing even more people out of the market. That vi-* cious circle of distress was also seen in recent years during the nickel meltdown and when European natural gas prices spiraled out of control following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rippling out to consumers, manufactures, currencies and economies.
“That’s what worries me the most,” said Jacques Torres, founder and chief executive officer of New Yorkbased Jacques Torres Chocolate, an artisan candy maker. “If this is the future, then we are going to see a lot of people out of business.”
Double-digit production declines are forecast for cocoa crops in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which account for about 50% of supplies. The shortage is so severe that both countries are rolling contracts to future harvests.
The International Cocoa
Organization (ICCO) predicts production will trail demand by 374,000 metric tons in the 2023-2024 season, the third straight shortfall. Chocolate maker Barry Callebaut AG sees a deficit of 500,000 tons, equal to about a 10th of the global market, and the company sees another shortfall next year.
“We have almost nothing more to offer for the rest of this season,” said Nicholars Quartey, 67, who cultivates 12 acres of the crop in the town of Suhum, about 100 kilometers north of Ghana’s capital of Accra.