Cocoa Crashed This Year. So Why Is Your Halloween Candy Still This Pricey?

Cocoa has taken one of the wildest round trips in the commodity market over the past two years. The bean that flavors most of the candy in a trick-or-treat bag climbed to a record above $10,000 a metric ton in late 2024, collapsed to a cycle low near $2,850 by April 2026, then rallied back toward $5,700 by the middle of August. Through all of it, the price of a bag of fun-size chocolate on the shelf has done one thing. It went up, and it stayed up. That disconnect is the story heading into Halloween. Shoppers were told for two years that record cocoa was the reason chocolate kept getting more expensive. The record is long gone, yet the prices are not. Cocoa’s Round Trip Cocoa’s spike was real and severe. Poor weather, aging trees, and disease in West Africa, which grows about 70% of t...