Cocoa Catastrophe: A Chocolatier's Egg-xistential Crisis
2024: No longer just the Plight of Unsold Easter Delights
Well, I’ve never been shy about the fact that Easter is my favourite holiday! Easter was always a big celebration in my house growing up and I love, Love, LOVE everything about it from the Easter egg hunt, to the chocolate bunnies to the time spent around an all day dinner extravaganza. But to be honest friends, this Easter especially, I’m having an egg-xistential crisis!
What is this crisis? Well, it started with the usual: How to make the perfect amount of Easter treats so everyone has enough and I don’t have any left over? From the start of my business I’ve prided myself in having a No Waste kitchen. See, one of my many blessings is that I had an amazing teacher when I became a Master Chocolatier (shoutout to Ecole Chocolat and Joanne at Cocoa West!!!) and her biggest piece of advice was to never throw out any product but find a way to reuse, recycle and recoup it. Treasure each piece of chocolate. But what’s this about a crisis you ask?? Usually, it’s just my perfectionism gene kicking in and over-worrying that I’ll make too little and disappoint someone or make too much and have unsold product a.k.a. The sin of wasted chocolate. But this year those worries seem like sweet dreams. Let me explain.
As someone that has a business making people happy, I love making beautiful, tasty chocolate treats all year! And when people get those treats, for whatever holiday season or special event, and they send me pictures of them enjoying them or comment on how much they loved them - that gives me a lot of joy! But one thing that can stress me is when people contact me at the last minute needing something special for someone they love and I can’t accommodate them because I’ve set a deadline for pre-orders or I’m just plumb sold out. See, I’m a people pleaser and I really do want everybody to have amazing holidays but this year especially the chocolate business has become a navigation nightmare with everybody’s (this includes you, dear reader) general costs going sky high but now for us chocolatiers, we’ve seen cocoa futures climb from just over $3500~4000/tonne in January to an unprecedented and staggering $10000 thousand dollars/tonne!! (Here’s a short article with a nice graph for those that want to see it to believe it: Cocoa - Price - Chart - Historical Data - News (tradingeconomics.com))
What does this mean for Chocolate, Chocolatiers, and Chocolate lovers everywhere?? Chaos! Should we panic and start hoarding chocolate? Should we just give up because our products are going to become too expensive to afford? Do we just hope that these prices (of futures, so stock options based on Traders guessing about what could happen this year) don’t translate over into chocolate price increases later? (Hah, when has that ever happened?) If I am disappointed when I can’t whip up a last minute chocolate Easter treat for a favourite customer, what’s going to happen when I can’t even afford to buy raw materials to make anything for anyone!? I worry that I won’t be able to afford to be a chocolatier anymore!!
We’ve got to do something, right? Maybe as chocolatiers we better start seriously thinking about ways to be more conscientious of how precious every little piece of chocolate is fast becoming. Up until now, it’s been relatively easy for some chocolatiers to just make an enormous batch of seasonally themed chocolates and rely on customers to buy most of them and then just discount or give away the orphans at the end of the season - but it looks like that might not be even remotely sustainable anymore with horrendous cost increases looming.
Here’s where we get back to the No Waste Kitchen. From my teacher’s imparted wisdom, I take literal steps and collect every kitchen scraping, all spare ingredient bits and bobs; I save and collect all those “Oops, my bad” mistakes and other chocolate orphans into several bins of my “chocolate stash”. When I have down time, I process them, beginning by melting them down, running them through a Stone Grinder (amazingly cool piece of equipment) for as many as 36 hours until it produces a totally unique, chocolate medley with a one-time-only taste profile. But that’s just the start: to elevate and enhance the flavour profile we introduce custom ingredients sourced from local producers and suppliers, adding an extra layer of depth and character to every batch. It’s what I affectionately call “Phoenix Chocolate” and is borne directly out of an ethos of appreciation for chocolate as a finite resource that deserves our respect and extra efforts.
So here we are: Easter is done and I proudly got my pre-orders sorted and the almost the perfect amount of treats made on time and normally that would have been my biggest worry -but, as the implications of these skyrocketing cocoa prices begin to reverberate throughout the chocolate industry, prompting a collective sense of unease and uncertainty, is it probably a good time to reconsider our business models and practices in the face of this new reality. Despite the challenges ahead, I hope there is a glimmer of hope rooted in the ethos of a No Waste Kitchen and our Phoenix Chocolate batches. Inspired by the notion that every piece of chocolate is precious, I am compelled to double down on my commitment to sustainability through innovation and I aim to navigate this crisis with resilience and ingenuity, doing what I can to make sure that the spirit of joy that surrounds my love of Easter can continue…
I can’t end it like that though! What can we all do to keep this egg-xistential crisis in check? We need thoughts, ideas and innovations. What do you think? Do you have thoughts or project ideas that might pave the way through this rough patch? Let us know! Let’s collaborate!! One idea we are working on with the Phoenix Chocolate is a tasting event where people would come to our commercial kitchen and make their own Dragon Egg event to celebrate the season 2 of House of Dragons, a Game of Thrones prequel! I mean how fun would it be to have your own Dragon egg to eat WHILE watching it?? It’s a thing, stay tuned!