Hello there! This is Geri, the owner of Open Book Chocolates. I wanted to take a moment to talk about recent global cacao shortages and price increases. There’s a lot of important information in this blog post, so I hope you’ll take the time to read this.
“Major African cocoa plants in Ivory Coast and Ghana have stopped or cut processing because they cannot afford to buy beans, four trading sources said, meaning chocolate prices around the world are likely to soar.
Chocolate-makers have already increased prices to consumers, after three years of poor cocoa harvests, with a fourth expected, in the two countries that produce nearly 60% of the world's cocoa.
Cocoa prices have more than doubled over the last year, scaling numerous all-time highs.”
“Other food companies are looking at different ways to offset the commodity price spike, including reducing the chocolate content of some products and replacing the cocoa-based confection with other sweet ingredients. Experts in a CNBC report cited the launch of Hershey's new Jumbo Reese's Cup as an example, giving buyers a bigger burst of peanut butter flavor to compensate for comparatively lower chocolate content.”
Here at Open Book Chocolates, we are not changing our recipes or replacing our cocoa with other ingredients. Our craft chocolate uses premium ingredients and, therefore, our prices are higher than Hershey’s and other household-name brands. With the global cacao shortage, we have no choice but to increase our prices so we can stay in business and continue to create special and unique, premium, handmade, bean-to-bar craft chocolate for our customers.
According to Krissee D'Aguiar, co-owner of River-Sea Chocolates (who we collaborate with to make all our chocolate bars), cacao butter has tripled in price and is very hard to come by. This is a huge challenge, because cacao butter is an important ingredient in dark, milk, and white chocolate. Of these three varieties, white chocolate uses the most cacao butter, so we are currently unable to make more Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey Tea & Honey in White Chocolate) bars. Furthermore, we have a limited number of Sherlock Holmes bars currently in stock. For the above reasons, we have increased our Sherlock Holmes bars to $15.00 each.
Other than Sherlock Holmes, we are keeping all our chocolate bars at $11.00 each until October 2024. This September, we will be launching a Kickstarter campaign for our two newest flavors (to be announced soon). During this time, our online store (openbookchocolates.com/shop) will be closed, though you can obtain our chocolate bars via Kickstarter. If you pledge to our KS campaign, your backer rewards (i. e. chocolate bars) will remain at $11.00 each (except for Sherlock Holmes). Once the campaign concludes, we will reopen our online store. When the online store reopens, all our chocolate bars will have increased to $12.00 each (with Sherlock Holmes remaining at $15.00 each).
Open Book Chocolates is a very small business. We are dedicated to offering our customers the very best chocolate we can. Every year, we continue to grow, and that’s all thanks to our loyal and enthusiastic customers.
Please let us know if you have any questions. Feel free to email us any time at openbookchocolates@email.com or use our contact form (openbookchocolates.com/contact).
Thank you for your understanding! We truly appreciate your continued support!
All the best,
Geri
Open Book Chocolates