Mathieu Victoire, co-owner of French bakery and restaurant Bistro 317 in downtown Grand Junction, pulled out the invoices from 2024 that showed exactly what he saw happen to chocolate prices in 2024.

Around Valentine’s Day last year, Bistro 317 paid $209 for a tablet (an 11-pound rectangle) of chocolate from vendor Dawn Food Products Inc.

“It’s high quality chocolate,” he said of the chocolate that Bistro 317 pastry chef Olivier Campe prefers. “Otherwise, my pastry chef would not use it.”

On May 8, that same tablet of chocolate cost $290. On Aug. 14, it was $382. Then, the Oct. 2 purchase had a much more mild increase and cost $390.

Summarizing the overall increase, Victoire said simply, “It’s insane, right?”

Any business that buys chocolate, from big-box retailers and grocery-store chains to small chocolatiers, watched their cost for chocolate increase and profit margins on chocolate sales decrease last year.

And many haven’t accounted yet for the spike in the cost of the cacao bean in December.

Investing.com showed U.S. Cocoa Futures on the last trading day of 2024 were at $11,545 per metric ton. It was better than the Dec. 17 price that climbed above $12,600 per metric ton, but it remained much higher than the Dec. 2 price of $9,038.

And to really understand how drastic the increase was during the year, the cost per metric ton on Jan. 2, 2024, was $4,205 after hovering around the $4,200 mark throughout December 2023. It more than doubled and at one point nearly tripled.

A sampling of Grand Junction small businesses that use chocolate revealed they felt the pain of the cost increase, but they didn’t pass it on to customers. At least not yet.

DIRTY LIL CACAO

Keane Karnan, whose full-time job is teaching culinary arts at the School District 51 Career Center, has a part-time passion for artisan chocolate, which he makes and sells at his business, Dirty Lil Cacao, 300 Main St., Suite 101, in downtown Grand Junction.

Karnan said he has been able to avoid increasing his prices at his 3-year-old business, because he built a good buffer into his pricing, which starts at a high price point for the high-quality product he makes.

He said it also helps that “I don’t have any employees. My overhead is pretty low.”

The industry forecast calls for cacao bean prices to increase another 10 percent in 2025, and anything more than that could push past Dirty Lil Cacao’s threshold.

Karnan said he’s trying to get creative to keep from raising his prices.

“When people look at the chocolate bar, at what point do they say, ‘I’d rather go have a Dove bar or Hershey’s bar?’ You know?” Karnan said. “So you kind of have to figure out how to thread that needle, because you don’t wanna scare away people and try and sell a chocolate bar for $15.”

Karnan fears relief from the causes of the high chocolate prices – such as climate change reducing harvests and diseases killing cacao trees, particularly in West Africa – may be two to three years down the road as new trees need to become of age to produce beans.

Interestingly, the cocoa beans from West Africa – Ivory Coast and Ghana combine for about 50 percent of the world’s production – are only a small portion of what Karnan uses, but he’s still affected. When the large companies that buy cocoa beans can’t get them from West Africa, they have to get beans from somewhere, “and that chocolate is the chocolate I go for,” Karnan said.

He added, “Now it’s really hard for me to actually find different varieties from different countries, because those chocolates are now being bought up by everybody else. So, it’s limited not just the amount that I can really buy, but the variety that I can buy.”

Karnan then put that into dollars and cents and said he used to spend a couple-hundred dollars to get “a pretty good amount of chocolate that I could utilize. Now, it’s like I’m spending about five or 10 times what I usually do to get probably half of what I normally got.”

BISTRO 317

For Bistro 317, located at 317 Main St., the only price increase related to chocolate it made during the past year was increasing the cost of a slice of Black Forest cake by 50 cents.

Victoire hopes to keep it that way. He acknowledges Bistro 317’s prices for pastries and desserts are “not cheap,” and customers are willing to pay for higher quality, but they have limits, and he doesn’t want to find out what those are.

Items at Bistro 317 that require chocolate in addition to the Black Forest cake include chocolate mousse, eclairs with chocolate on top, croissants with chocolate inside and brownies. Victoire emphasizes every pastry and dessert is made in-house.

“I’m trying to stay competitive and affordable,” he said. “We are known for pastries. If we have to charge too much, people won’t pay for it.”

ENSTROM CANDIES

At Enstrom Candies, 701 Colorado Ave. in Grand Junction, co-owner Doug Simons said his business was impacted “quite a bit” last year by the high chocolate prices.

“Chocolate is a significant ingredient in nearly all the products we produce. It causes us to pay very close attention to the cocoa markets and try to place contracts during price dips and try to mitigate the impact of this very volatile market,” he wrote in an email interview.

Simons said Enstrom Candies always contracts for chocolate based on market fluctuations.

“Depending on the market price on any given day, we’ll contract for say 200,000 pounds,” he said. “As we do that over time we can buffer the impacts of extreme market fluctuations.”

Because of that, he said Enstrom Candies came into 2024 well protected against the price spikes that occurred during the year.

“We had around 800,000 to 1 million pounds under contract at various price levels that were quite a bit lower,” he said. “As we add contracts we price average with the previous buys. So, we were protected as the market began to go crazy last year.”

But that brings him to 2025, and Simons acknowledged, “We have now run though those favorable contracts, so we are now dealing with pricing nearly double of what we were paying. We’ll manage as best we can and continue to try and bring value to our customers.”

Simons said there will be some price increases on products with chocolate in them, and the increases will vary depending on the amount of chocolate. For example, molded items that are 100 percent chocolate will be affected more than toffee, where chocolate is only 20 percent of the total ingredients.

Simons anticipates some price increases will be made on items leading into Valentine’s Day and Easter, two holidays that bring boosts in chocolate sales. For Enstrom’s, those sales seasons rank second and third, respectively, for revenue behind the Thanksgiving and Christmas season.