'Whither' the price of chocolate?

“The prices of Easter eggs are out of control. Time to tell the kids the Easter bunny has died.”

So went a quote in an Australian news article in late February 2026 bemoaning the high price of chocolate.

One confectionary vendor (best remaining nameless) maintained: “Like all chocolate makers, we are navigating significantly higher cocoa and input costs globally.”

Being purveyors of commodity hedging software (and hoping makers of our favourite snack might have used our software to try prevent the demise of the Easter bunny) we were intrigued. Cocoa prices have been falling significantly over the past eight months and more importantly, so have sugar prices, while skim milk powder has remained relatively constant.

So we thought we would construct a little chocolate bar index based on approximate proportions of the main chocolate slab ingredients and compare that with the price of a well-known product over the last three years. We chose an old favourite, the Cadburys Dairy Milk 180g slab sold at a large UK supermarket. To ensure no single product price anomaly we also extracted the chocolate maker PPI from the FRED time series database.

Intriguing indeed! Chocolate prices have risen steeply over the past three years. So have input costs but three quarters of a typical chocolate bar (cocoa and sugar) have fallen sharply since June last year. The theoretical index implies prices of chocolate (factoring some inflation and other costs) should fall significantly, perhaps even melt.

Will they? To all our fellow sweet tooths out there, let’s hope they do; and in time for next Easter at least.

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