About four times a week, a cocoa truck pulls into the Mondelez International chocolate factory on Gladstone Avenue in Toronto.
The plant makes almost all the Cadbury brand products for the Canadian market — Caramilk, Dairy Milk, Mini Eggs, Creme Eggs — and uses about 35 metric tonnes of cocoa butter and cocoa liquor a week. This month, the price of cocoa beans on global commodity markets spiked due to bad weather in West African growing regions, so those truckloads of cocoa entering the Gladstone factory could soon end up costing double what they did a year ago.
The global run on cocoa futures, which has been gaining for months, is promising to drive up prices for consumers and pressure manufacturers around the world to make slimmer, smaller chocolate bars. The only question left is when.
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