Climate Change Is Here For Your Chocolate

Last year, we reported how extreme weather events may be dwindling the future of chocolate. Just last week, we saw an inkling of that: The Hershey Company announced it would significantly raise the cost of its candy in the face of historically high cocoa prices. So, we're revisiting host Emily Kwong https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong's conversation with Yasmin Tayag https://www.yasmintayag.com/, a food, health and science writer at The Atlantic. They get into the cocoa shortage: What's causing it, how it's linked to weather and poor farming conditions and what potential solutions exist. Plus, they enjoy a chocolate alternative taste test. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:11Regina Barber?

  Hey, short waveers. Regina Barber here. Last week, the Hershey Company announced that it was raising its candy prices because of rising cocoa costs. So we thought it'd be a good time to revisit a 2024 episode where my co-host Emily Kwong talks about the shrinking future of chocolate and what climate change has to do with all of it. Here's the show.

• 0:31Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:36Emily Kwong?

  Chocolate is not a topic of deep scientific inquiry. Or is it?

• 0:43Emily Kwong?

  Mmm, hmm, okay. This is melting in a completely different way.

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:47Emily Kwong?

  I have a confession to make. I keep an emergency chocolate stash in my pantry at all times. I eat it like it's my job. But I met someone recently for whom chocolate is her job. Yasmin Tayag is a food, health, and science writer for The Atlantic. And last week, she led me in a chocolate taste test.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  It tastes like a chocolate pastry.

• 1:07Emily Kwong?

  I wonder if that's the oats. Because Yasmin recently wrote about how the chocolate industry is changing. Before her reporting, she called herself a fan of cheap chocolate.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  One of my guiltiest pleasures is the Cadbury cream egg. And it's just pure sweetness. It makes me feel like a five-year-old kid hyped up on sugar at Easter time.

• 1:30Emily Kwong?

  But for this taste test, Yasmin wanted me to try something from a Germany-based company called Planet A Foods. Their product, Choviva.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Their chocolate is notable because it contains no cocoa.

• 1:43Emily Kwong?

  The product is made mostly from oats.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  The color looks a little darker than a typical milk chocolate bar to me.

• 1:52Emily Kwong?

  And it tasted yummy. We really liked the alt-chocolate peanut butter cups in particular. It's giving, honestly, the flavors of my childhood.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  If you didn't tell me this wasn't chocolate, I would have no idea.

• 2:06Emily Kwong?

  Yasmin has been keeping eyes on the evolving chocolate industry for a while. Retail prices for chocolate are soaring as yearly harvests of cocoa are dipping. And when she noticed the price of cocoa was on par with the price of copper, she had to write a story.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  Especially as I realized that it was going to have such a, potentially have such a huge impact on the chocolate that I eat all the time.

• 2:29Emily Kwong?

  So today on the show, big changes are ahead in the chocolate industry. We get into the science of cocoa trees, the struggles that farmers face in a changing climate, and what consumers can expect from bean to bark. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:54Speaker 00

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• 4:09Emily Kwong?

  Okay, Yasmin, I learned a lot from your article about chocolate, the state of the chocolate industry, and the fact that there's an actual definition of what can be deemed chocolate. This is an FDA standard. What is it?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Yes, according to the FDA, chocolate has to contain at minimum 10% cocoa.

• 4:30Emily Kwong?

  And if it's not, it doesn't get to be the big C, the chocolate.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  It doesn't get to be the big C, but it can be chocolate flavored or, you know, chocolate-like.

• 4:41Emily Kwong?

  Got it. Well, let's back up to chocolate itself and where it comes from. It comes from a plant. Tell me about these trees and where they grow.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Let me preface this by saying cocoa trees are known to be very finicky, very fussy plants. They like things to be just so. And so one of their most important characteristics is they only grow within about 20 degrees north and south of the equator. That's not a lot of area. The trees like this region because they have very specific requirements for heat and moisture. They're kind of tall, you know, at least taller than a basketball net, sometimes much taller. They tend to have a sort of rounded squat appearance because of the way their branches grow.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  They've got really beautiful, dark green, glossy leaves. And hanging from the branches are these pods. To me, they look like deflated footballs. They're kind of elongated, a little wrinkly. They can be football-colored or sometimes brighter colors like red or orange or yellow or even purple. And it's inside these pods that we get the cocoa bean. What you see instead of like brown beans are... They look like white fruit, kind of like light cheese.

• 6:05Emily Kwong?

  Okay, how big are they?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  About date-sized.

• 6:08Emily Kwong?

  Okay.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  They're kind of fluffy. So this is the pulp surrounding the cocoa bean.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  And that has to be removed before, you know, the processing can begin.

• 6:19Emily Kwong?

  What is the process? What are some of the major steps?

• 6:21Speaker 03

  As I learned, it's so complicated to get from fruit to chocolate bar.

• 6:26Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, like the final product is nothing like the fruit in so many ways.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Not at all. So first step, remove the bean from the fruit. Then the beans are fermented. And what fermentation does is it helps the flavor develop and gets rid of any bitter tastes.

• 6:47Emily Kwong?

  OK, so like the flavor of chocolate is really coming from this fermentation process?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  That's the first step. There's so much more. So for after fermentation, then you dry the beans. Then they are roasted. So much like coffee beans, these raw beans get most of their flavor from the way they're roasted, the temperature at which they're roasted and for how long. But it has this husk on it that you don't want. So the bean is split open and that husk is removed. And what you're left with is the cocoa nib. This cocoa nib is the edible part. This is later ground down to release cocoa mass, like cocoa solids, plus cocoa butter, which is the fat that comes out of this.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  This stage and later, you might start adding milk and sugar and other flavoring agents. More refining, then tempering happens, which is the process of like heating and cooling chocolate so that we get the snap that we want and that glossy coating on it. And then finally, you can turn that into something like a bar or a chocolate shelf or an egg.

• 8:00Emily Kwong?

  OK, OK, OK. You know, one of the big takeaways from your article is that climate change is coming for chocolate. It is already impacting the chocolate industry right now. What does that look like?

• 8:11Speaker 03

  So many things are happening, but the big thing I would say is that the weather is becoming really erratic where chocolate is supposed to grow. Most of the world's chocolate comes from two countries in West Africa. That is Ivory Coast and Ghana. So when the weather there gets weird, that really affects the entire global supply. And so what we've been seeing lately is heavier than usual rainfall. And what this did last year was create the conditions for a fungus to spread that causes something called black pod disease. You'll see little blotches appear on the cocoa pods as they're on the trees and slowly they'll just turn black.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  They'll rot on the plant, fall off that tanks production. And then earlier this year, you had drier than usual conditions. It sucked all the moisture out of these plantations that the trees require and production started to tip. So all of this is happening as another really severe virus is decimating cocoa. And this is called swollen shoot virus. It causes these bulges on the trees and ultimately kills them over time. And what's really devastating about this particular disease is that once it's on a plantation, it spreads rapidly.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  It can cross into other people's plantations and the only way to get rid of it is to uproot all the trees and start fresh.

• 9:46Emily Kwong?

  This just sounds untenable for any chocolate farmer.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Totally. Another way that climate change could change chocolate as we know it is that it might change the flavor of the beans. So the cocoa plants are very sensitive to fluctuations in temperature. And, you know, as the climate becomes more erratic, this could result in inconsistent flavors coming out in the cocoa beans themselves. And the way the cocoa industry might Deal with this is by roasting the beans to a really high temperature to sort of eliminate all discrepancies. But it might also get rid of a lot of the complexity in the beans resulting in maybe more boring, less interesting chocolate.

• 10:33Emily Kwong?

  So you were saying earlier that most of the world's chocolate supply comes from just two countries, Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. And you say in your article that in Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old and that a new generation of farmers there is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry. What other issues do cocoa farmers in this region face beyond climate and beyond an aging workforce?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is they're paid so little for what they do, in part because the prices for cocoa that they earn, they don't totally reflect the market. They're set by the governments of those countries at the beginning of the growing season. They don't have money to buy pesticides. They aren't able to invest in irrigation. It is a really bad industry to be in. Somebody's got to pick these pods. And unfortunately, it's often children, people under 15 years old. Sometimes farmers, out of desperation because they're not getting enough money for their crop, lease out land for illegal gold mining.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  For the farmer, it is a way to make a little bit more money just to get by.

• 11:51Emily Kwong?

  Meanwhile, you say in your piece that demand for chocolate is rising?

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:56Emily Kwong?

  So how are you squaring this reality with that?

• 12:01Speaker 03

  The way things stand right now, there isn't going to be enough chocolate. But there are a couple of things that could change, potentially. I think a big thing is that the cocoa-growing regions could expand out of West Africa into other parts of the world along the equator. Chocolate makers might end up using less cocoa. Or what the hope is for people who are still feeling a little more optimistic about the cocoa industry is that the big chocolate makers like Hershey's and Cadbury Will finally realize that they have to invest in these small farms if they want to keep up the supply that they've had for this long. And that would mean, you know, paying them a living wage.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  But none of that is guaranteed. And for now, there is no real way to square the growing demand with the decreased supply.

• 12:56Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. And your piece highlights some statistics from this Reuters article that I want to share, that the International Cocoa Organization expects global cocoa production to fall by nearly 11% this season. And then, according to a market research firm named Circana, US retail stores charged over 11% more for chocolate products last year versus 2022. So, given all this, what do you think consumers are going to see from chocolate?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  I think we're already starting to see it. You know, chocolate prices are rising and chocolate is getting smaller, or at least like the package sizes are getting smaller. The chocolate companies have to make up the cost somehow if cocoa is really costing that much more. And so maybe more peanut butter cups with a lot of peanut butter and less chocolate, or like chocolate bars with so many almonds and fruits in them.

• 13:49Emily Kwong?

  Or maybe you try out some alternative chocolates.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, the alternative chocolate space is interesting. It's kind of like the fake meat of chocolate. I think for those of us who've had the privilege of eating chocolate like this our whole lives, you know, it really makes you ask, what made this kind of chocolate so ubiquitous in the first place?

• 14:18Emily Kwong?

  Yasmin Tayeg is a reporter for The Atlantic. Thank you so much for talking to us.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 14:27Emily Kwong?

  You can find a link to Yasmin's article in our episode notes. This episode was produced and fact-checked by Burleigh McCoy and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Ko Takasugi Chernovin was the audio engineer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

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