Transcript:
Conway Gittens: If your sweetie has a sweet-tooth then prepare to feel a little sour when you get to the cash register for Valentine’s Day. Chocolate prices are up an eye-popping 20 percent this year.
The reason you’ll have to pay more to show your love is due to a surge in the price of cocoa. The raw material used to make chocolate jumped to a record high of more than $12,600 per metric ton in December. Years of bad weather and agricultural disease have hurt cocoa production, which is largely done in West African nations like Ghana. Prices have eased somewhat to around the $10,000 mark, but that’s still up from about $6,000 a year ago. Over the past two years, the price of making chocolate has surged more than 167 percent, according to the Producer Price Index.
Here’s a random sampling of chocolate prices this Valentine’s Day. Lindt says a box of heart-shaped chocolate candy truffles will set you back 22 bucks. Hershey’s locked in prices a year ahead of time, so it says a 1-pound bar of its eponymous chocolate will cost $14.99. On Godiva’s website you can find a 9-piece gift box for $22. Americans consume 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, says the Cocoa Merchant’s Association of America.
By the way, Americans are expected to spend a record $27.5 billion on Valentine’s Day gifts including chocolates in 2025. According to the National Retail Federation – that’s up from $25.8 billion last year.
Turning now to financial markets, the Dow was feeling the love on Tuesday after feeling broken-hearted earlier in the day. Shares of Coca-Cola rallied on a resurgence in demand for its drinks, especially Coke Zero Sugar and Fairlife milk. Total sales and profits topped quarterly forecasts.
That’ll do it for your Daily Briefing. From the New York City, I’m Conway Gittens with TheStreet.
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