The Easter aisle arrived in the supermarket while I was still wearing a coat. Eggs in foil. Bunnies in boxes stacked too high. A price that make my mum do the small pause she do when she is deciding whether something go back on the shelf.
By this month, cocoa futures had fallen more than 70% from the late-2024 peak, when a tonne cost over $12,000. Now it is around $3,000 to $3,300, after better harvests in West Africa. I see that on the news and think, fine, chocolate will be ordinary again. Then a Reuters piece on 20 March say US Easter eggs and bunnies were staying expensive anyway.
The reason is almost insultingly simple. Chocolate makers buy beans months ahead. Most of the Easter stock was made when cocoa was still painfully costly. The cheaper beans arriving now are too late for the foil already sitting in a warehouse. Candy prices are still up more than 11% on last year. People who follow this for a living say we might not feel relief until around Halloween, which is a long time to wait for something that is supposed to be a treat.
In Business they talk about cost and price as if the two hold hands. Cost is what it take to make the thing. Price is what the shop ask you for. When the cost of a raw material collapse, you expect the ticket on the shelf to follow. Sometimes it do. Often it do not, because of time. Firms are not buying today’s beans for today’s aisle. They bought yesterday’s beans, at yesterday’s panic, and they are not going to sell that stock cheap just because the market calm down. There is a lag, and the lag have a season. Easter was priced in the expensive months. Halloween might be priced in these cheaper ones. I will believe the second sentence when I see a smaller number on a packet.
The part that sat wrongly with me is the other end of the chain. If cocoa is cheaper, Ghanaian farmers get paid less. The same swing that should have helped at our till is already hurting the people who grew the beans. I do not get to treat a crash as a gift. Someone’s income move in the opposite direction to my Easter egg, and the egg did not even get cheaper.
I stood there and did the unhelpful thing I do now: I try to see the lag inside the foil. A harvest. A contract signed months ago. A factory that cannot un-make a bunny. A supermarket that know this egg was made in the expensive months, and that March is a bad time to look cheap.
School will have the usual tin of something foil-wrapped on the last day before the break, and someone will say it was expensive this year as if that were weather. It is weather, in a way. A harvest, then a contract, then a factory, then a shelf. The news just arrive in the wrong order.
I still want the egg. That is not a defence of the price. It is only proof that the lag work, even when you can see it, standing in a coat, holding a box that did not get the news.