The rising price of cocoa will not be reflected in the final products for many months, said Tomáš Prouza, president of the Trade and Tourism Association of the Czech Republic. However, due to the strong competition on the market, he does not expect the retail chains to significantly increase their prices. Chocolate shops advertise higher prices. If the situation with cocoa on the stock market does not improve, people will pay five to ten percent more for products from Čokoládovna Janek. The Steiner & Kovařík chocolate shop then assumes that prices will be lower by tens of percent. On Tuesday, the price of cocoa exceeded USD 10,000 (roughly CZK 232,600) per ton for the first time.
“Today the price of cocoa will be reflected in the final products in a number of months, this will be countered by the lower prices of energy and other raw materials,” Prouza said. According to him, retail chains offer dozens of more than 10,000 items of cocoa products such as chocolates. “In general, I don’t expect that anyone will allow themselves to raise prices beyond what the supplier adjusts them to. Rather the opposite. It is therefore necessary to ask the manufacturers why they want to raise prices, when they still produce from cheap cocoa from the previous harvest,” he added.
Some chocolatiers will raise prices due to the rise in the price of cocoa
According to manager Václav Durďák, the price of the Janek Chocolate Factory rose by a tenth year-on-year in January. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t even that expensive yet because of the prices cocoa on the stock exchange, but due to the increase in the price of all inputs in general in the last two to three years,” he said. When the company was ordering supplies at the end of last year cocoa for this year, according to Durďák, the prices of this commodity were already high, but still 60 percent lower than now. “We never started to cheat the products when the price of input increased, but we simply also increased the price so that we could maintain the quality and taste of the products. In the past, we had the same development with the price of vanilla, for example,” he added. The co-owner of the Steiner & Kovařík chocolate factory, Petr Kovařík, said that the prices of cocoa beans for industrial chocolate manufacturers can rise up to fivefold. “We producers, who produce traditionally, slowly and using ball mills, are also affected by this situation, but relatively much less, because before this we were buying at much higher prices for reasons of sustainability and direct purchase from farmers,” he said. Nevertheless, he assumes that the prices of the Steiner & Kovařík chocolate shop, given the current situation with cocoa will increase by lower tens of percent. According to him, this will be especially evident on bar chocolates. With a possible increase in the price of products from cocoa the Saint-Tropez pastry shop in Prague is still waiting. Already last year, due to higher inflation and energy prices, it had to raise prices, which led to a decrease in interest in sweet products by seven to ten percent, said company executive Lukáš Otys. “Overall sales have decreased and we don’t want to further demotivate the customer and lead them to consider visiting the pastry shop,” he said. Nestlé spokesperson for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Tereza Skrbková, does not expect prices to rise cocoa in the commodity markets, after the current increase, they returned to the original level, due to the long-term problems that accompany the production of this commodity. “They are stabilizing at a new level that will prove that cocoa is a valuable commodity and its availability has its limits,” she said. One of the reasons for the increase in prices cocoa is a poor bean crop in Africa due to high temperatures, according to analysts.
