Cocoa Prices Crash 75%; Tony's Chocolonely Warns of Farmer Poverty, Not Relief
Cocoa prices surged to a record $12,906 a tonne in December 2024 before collapsing by over 75% to $2,952 by February this year. This volatility has disproportionately impacted West Africa's 2.5 million cocoa farmers, who saw minimal benefit from the boom and now face severe cuts, such as Ghana's 28.6% farmgate price reduction, leaving beans unsold. Tony's Chocolonely, which pays a living-income price regardless of market fluctuations, has maintained growth, earned a top score on the 2026 Chocolate Scorecard, and celebrates its 21st anniversary in November, reaffirming its founding mission.
The chocolate industry is about to enjoy its cheapest cocoa in over two years, and Tony's Chocolonely is treating it as an emergency. The price collapse — from a record $12,906 a tonne in New York to under $3,000 at February's low — has triggered exactly what the Dutch brand has warned about for two decades: when the market falls, the farmers fall furthest.
The wreckage is documented. Ghana cut its farmgate price by 28.6% for the rest of the season, Ivory Coast slashed its mid-crop price by 57%, and around 100,000 tonnes of unsold beans piled up as international traders stopped buying — leaving farmers unpaid for months, and some, as the Associated Press reported, surrendering cocoa land to illegal sand mining just to earn.
U.S. News & World Report
African Agribusiness
The cruellest part is that the boom never reached them either. West Africa's fixed farmgate systems shield farmers from market swings in both directions — a structural disconnect between headline cocoa prices and farmer income that meant growers watched the $12,000 peak from behind an administered price, then took the full force of the crash.
Cocoa Runners
Tony's runs the opposite model, on purpose. The company pays a living-income reference price for traceable beans regardless of where the market sits, works long-term with farmer cooperatives — and hands the entire sourcing model to competitors through Tony's Open Chain, the pipeline it built so rivals could copy it.
When prices plunged in June, the company said the quiet part loudly: "This kind of price drop shows just how fragile the system is for cocoa farmers in West Africa. When prices fall, farmers are pushed further below into poverty... it increases both the risk of issues like child labour — because poverty remains the root cause — and the risk of deforestation."
Food Manufacture
The model is winning on the scoreboard that matters. Tony's took one of only two overall green scores in the 2026 Chocolate Scorecard — the annual assessment coordinated by Be Slavery Free — in an edition that deliberately weighted measurable outcomes over stated commitments. The business grew through the price chaos, reported at around $230 million, and CEO Douglas Lamont told Bloomberg this month he believes it should be a billion-dollar brand.
Supply Chain Digital
Bloomberg
The company was born making this exact argument. In 2003, Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken tried to have himself prosecuted as a "chocolate criminal" for knowingly buying chocolate made with exploited labour; the brand he founded in 2005 still divides its bars unequally, because the industry's money is divided unequally — and still cites the industry's grimmest numbers: 1.56 million children in illegal labour and at least 30,000 instances of forced labour on cocoa farms in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.
Trend context
The cocoa whiplash is the food-business story of the decade, and it just entered its second act. Act one, 2024: El Niño, disease and decades of underinvestment collapsed West African harvests, prices tripled, and every headline was about expensive chocolate. Act two, 2026: supply recovered, the market crashed 75%, and the same farmers who never captured the boom are now being left, in one producer's words, to "die in poverty." Two opposite market conditions, one identical outcome — which converts a commodity story into a systems story, and the systems story is Tony's home turf.
Regulation sharpens the timing. The EU Deforestation Regulation's December 2026 deadline demands geolocation mapping across cocoa supply chains precisely when suppressed farmgate prices leave farmers least able to fund it — traceability becoming law just as the industry discovers Tony's has been running traceable beans for years. And the accountability era has arrived on the measurement side too: the 2026 Scorecard's shift from commitments to outcomes is the whole ESG world's direction of travel, and it just ranked the entire industry.
For consumer desks, the story inverts beautifully: cheaper chocolate is coming to shelves, and the brand with the red wrapper wants shoppers to ask what the discount cost.
About Tony's Chocolonely
Why we exist
In the company's own words: "We exist to end exploitation in cocoa. And not just the cocoa in our chocolate, but in all chocolate worldwide." The bar is divided unequally because the industry's money is — and the company exists to make that impossible to un-see, one wrapper at a time.
How we do it
Five sourcing principles, applied for two decades: fully traceable beans, a higher price towards a living income, strong farmer cooperatives, long-term relationships, and investment in quality and productivity. The price paid doesn't follow the market down. And the model is deliberately given away — Tony's Open Chain lets any competitor source through the same traceable, better-paying pipeline the company built.
What we do
Tony's Chocolonely makes chocolate — bars, seasonal ranges and gifts — sold across Europe, the US and Japan from its Amsterdam headquarters, with around 473 employees. Alongside the brand runs Open Chain, the sourcing platform through which other chocolate makers adopt Tony's supply model.
Why it matters
The enemy is the economics of Big Chocolate: an industry where 2.5 million West African farmers lose in the boom and lose in the bust, where 1.56 million children work illegally on cocoa farms, and where record corporate profits and root-cause poverty have coexisted for a century. Cheap cocoa isn't a saving. It's a bill someone else pays.
Who it's for
Everyone who eats chocolate — which is the point. The visceral version: the shopper at the till who turns the wrapper over, reads where the beans came from, and realises no other bar on the shelf can tell them.
Proof points
One of only two green scores among global chocolate companies on the 2026 Chocolate Scorecard. Reported revenue around $230 million. Growth maintained through the worst cocoa price volatility on record. 21 years old in November. 473 employees. A sourcing model adopted by competitors through Open Chain — including a Ben & Jerry's collaboration that sold millions of bars.
Traction & credibility
Named by Fortune among the world's fastest-growing chocolatiers in 2024; profiled by Bloomberg and Forbes within the past two months; top-scored by the outcome-weighted 2026 Scorecard. The commercial engine keeps pace with the mission: 2026 brought the company's first filled-bar range into UK retail and US majors including Target, Walmart and Whole Foods, and continued expansion under a CEO recruited from one of Europe's biggest mission-led consumer brands.
Spokespeople
Douglas Lamont
Chief Chocolonely
The origin scar is a choice: he ran Innocent Drinks, one of Europe's biggest mission-led consumer brands, and left it for the company whose entire premise is that his industry's supply chains are broken. His unfair advantage: he's already scaled purpose inside mainstream retail once, so "mission versus growth" is a false choice he's disproved before — and his stated ambition is a billion-dollar brand that ends exploitation, not despite the mission but through it.
Talking points
The insight
cheap cocoa is the disaster: the crash proves the system, not the weather, is broken
The story
Cocoa fell more than 75% from its record, and Tony's Chocolonely's position is that this is the emergency, not the relief: falling prices push farmers deeper into poverty, raising the risk of child labour and deforestation — the exact outcomes the industry claims to be eliminating. The stance is contrarian to every procurement desk celebrating cheaper beans, and it comes with 21 years of conviction receipts: a living-income price paid through boom and bust alike, fully traceable beans, and a sourcing pipeline handed to competitors.
Why it matters
The industry has now run the complete experiment: record-high cocoa left farmers poor, and crashed cocoa left them poorer. If both market extremes produce the same human outcome, the market isn't the mechanism that fixes this — which is the most uncomfortable conclusion available to an industry whose sustainability pledges assume otherwise, twelve months before EU traceability law bites.
Who does it impact
Shoppers get the question the discount hides. Retailers get a benchmark for what "ethical" means when it's measured in outcomes. Competitors get a working, adoptable alternative through Open Chain rather than a lecture. And 2.5 million West African farmers get the only major buyer whose price didn't crash with the market.
Proof points
Ivory Coast's 57% mid-crop price cut and 100,000 tonnes of unsold beans; Ghana's 28.6% farmgate reduction. Against it: Tony's living-income model, one of only two green scores in the outcome-weighted 2026 Chocolate Scorecard, growth through the volatility, and a 21-year track record of the same position.
CTA
Douglas Lamont available for the crisis interview; the annual FAIR report carries the model's numbers; tonyschocolonely.com/open-chain for the industry version of the answer.
Images
Tony Stack
BRand Promise
Tonys Rice Crispy Caramel
Filled
Get in touch
Douglas Lamont
Chief Chocolonely
Drop me a note and I'll reply by email.