A chocolate brand has vowed not to reduce the size or distinctive ‘chunkiness’ of its chocolate bars, even after raising prices due to escalating cocoa costs.
Dutch chocolatier, Tony’s Chocolonely, has consistently spoken out about the challenges facing West African cocoa farming amidst rising expenses for chocolate producers.
The brand is known for its chunky chocolate bars in innovative flavours, such as milk chocolate rice crisp caramel and the “everything” bar, currently retailing at £4 for a 180 gram bar.
Douglas Lamont, Tony’s Chocolonely’s chief executive, said “everyone has paid the price” for the problems, which were worsened by poor harvests as a result of extreme weather conditions.
“It was such a big economic shock in terms of the change; when your core commodity, the thing that makes up 50% of your cost, goes up five times, you have to respond and that has to feed through into consumer prices,” Mr Lamont told the Press Association.
“And so we, and everybody else, have put our price up on the shelf.”
But Mr Lamont said the brand was not going to “take the cost saving opportunity” of reducing the size of its chocolate bars and selling it for the same price.
“Yes we’ve introduced different sized bars at different prices, but our big chunky 180 gram bar, which is typically bigger than most products on shelf and therefore a lot more expensive, we’re not going to downsize that to hit a certain price point,” he said.
Mr Lamont said the brand does not want to compromise on “the chunkiness of our bars that people love”, adding: “We think consumers are prepared to pay the premium for something that tastes great.”
So-called ‘shrinkflation’ has become widespread in the chocolate industry, with shoppers noticing products shrinking in size as manufacturers grapple with soaring costs.
Galaxy KitKat, Penguin, Quality Street and Freddo are among those to have made changes in recent years, often by reducing the quantity of chocolate in a multipack or cutting the size of individual chocolate bars.
As well as selling chocolate, Tony’s Chocolonely operates a company named Tony’s Open Chain which enables other businesses to source cocoa through its own model, including competitor brands.
The company is focused on ethically sourcing cocoa, which means paying farmers a higher price, and advocates for reducing exploitation in supply chains, including modern slavery and child labour.
It has more than 20 partners including Waitrose and Aldi, who use the firm’s cocoa bean sourcing model for their own-brand chocolate bars.
Mr Lamont said the industry has “systematically underinvested in the farmers in West Africa” which exacerbated the cocoa crisis, and that change needs to happen to limit the damage “when the next climate shock hits, which it will”.
“There’s a moral argument around it, but there’s also a very clear economic argument now,” the chief executive said.