Cocoa has halved, and chocolate in Florianópolis is still climbing

This report follows three prices. The first is the IPCA, Brazil’s official consumer price index, which IBGE measures in 16 cities and metropolitan areas (IBGE, 2026a). The IPCA has an item for chocolate bars and bonbons, “chocolate em barra e bombom”. In this report, “chocolate” means that item. The IPCA covers no city in Santa Catarina.

The second price is the local one. Udesc Esag, a business school of the Santa Catarina state university, has measured the cost of living in Florianópolis since 1968 (Udesc Esag, 2026). Each month it prices 297 items for families with incomes from one to forty minimum wages. Its bulletin lists every item whose price moved, with the change. We read the chocolate item from each bulletin since January 2019. A month in which the bulletin does not list the item counts as no change.

The third price is cocoa. We use the World Bank’s monthly world price, in US dollars a tonne (World Bank, 2026). We convert it to reais a kilogram at Banco Central’s average PTAX rate for the month (Banco Central do Brasil, 2026b). For the latest days we read daily cocoa prices from Dukascopy (Dukascopy, 2026).

Two terms recur. “This year” means January to September 2026, the months both price indexes have published. A “yearly rise” compares a month with the same month a year earlier. To measure the delay, we compare the yearly change in cocoa in reais with the yearly rise in chocolate some months later. The lag with the closest match is the delay.

Two other tools appear later. An index sets a price to 100 in a base month, here December 2022, so that prices in different units share one scale. A cost share turns a change in cocoa into a change in the cost of a bar. We take the share from the industry, not from our own data.

Every source is its latest release as of October 15, 2026. Both price indexes and the World Bank’s cocoa price run to September 2026. Supermarket sales run to August, Banco Central’s credit figures to August and unemployment to the second quarter. The daily cocoa and dollar prices run to October 15.

The local index sets the scope of this report. Udesc Esag publishes each item’s monthly change, and it does not publish item weights or the shops it visits. So the report measures how far and when the local price moved. A split by brand, shop and pack size needs the item’s price list. A request to Udesc Esag for it is the next step.

From 2012 to 2022, cocoa averaged about $2,500 a tonne (Fig. 2). Then West Africa’s crop failed. In the 2023/24 season, Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa crop fell by a quarter and Ghana’s by almost a third (ICCO, 2025). The two countries grow most of the world’s cocoa, so the price had to ration a shortfall. Floods, heat and a tree virus caused the losses, as our earlier report on coffee and chocolate showed (Atol Research, 2026).

The rise came in two waves. In the first four months of 2024 the world price more than doubled, from $4,400 to $9,740 a tonne. After a pause, the second wave took it to a peak of $10,750 in January 2025, the monthly average.

On the daily record, cocoa reached $12,621 on December 18, 2024 (Dukascopy, 2026). Then the harvests recovered. In 2024/25 the world moved from a cocoa deficit to a surplus of 37,000 tonnes (ICCO, 2026). Production rose 8.5%, and grindings fell 3.3%. Grindings are the beans that processors turn into cocoa butter and powder.

In reais the swing was larger, because the dollar rose and fell with cocoa. The dollar cost R$5.24 on average in December 2022, R$6.02 in January 2025 and R$5.23 in March 2026 (Banco Central do Brasil, 2026b). So a weak real made the peak higher in reais, and a strong real made the low deeper. Cocoa cost R$13.20 a kilogram in December 2022 and R$64.70 in January 2025. By March 2026 it was down to R$17.00. That is the crash in this report’s title.

The growers felt it first. Côte d’Ivoire cut its fixed farm price for the 2026/27 main crop by more than half (Atol Research, 2026). A farm price set by the state moves within a season. A chocolate bar in a Brazilian shop moves much later, as the next section shows.

The crash did not last. Cocoa almost doubled from its daily low of $2,891 on February 27, 2026 to $5,767 on October 15 (Dukascopy, 2026). In September the monthly average was $5,920 a tonne, or R$30.50 a kilogram. The dollar costs 7.2% less than a year ago, which cuts the rise in reais (Banco Central do Brasil, 2026b).

So cocoa today is half its peak and still far above its old level. In reais it costs 2.3 times its December 2022 price, and 3.4 times its average from 2012 to 2022. The rest of this report reads every chocolate price against that scale.