Sydney’s pastry chefs and chocolatiers are getting creative to stay afloat during the global chocolate crisis. Here’s what you’ll be eating more – and less – of.
As experts warn sky-high chocolate prices are here to stay, Sydney pastry chefs and chocolatiers are scrambling to adapt and survive. Savvy patisseries are cutting back on chocolate in their cakes, top-end restaurants are using lower-grade chocolate for desserts, and chocolate-makers are downsizing their bars.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve never seen it like it,” said Tina Angelidis, co-founder of Adora Handmade Chocolates, which has eight stores across Sydney. Adora has held firm on quality for now, absorbing much of the cost and hoping for better times. It isn’t easy. “Chocolate prices have doubled in the past year,” Angelidis said.
The increasing cost of cocoa butter – which chocolate-makers use in ganache – is even worse. “I used to pay $15 or $20 a kilo, now it’s $100,” Kakawa Chocolates owner and head chef Jinsun Kim said.
Yves Scherrer, the pastry chef who worked at hatted Sydney restaurants Berowra Waters Inn and Sokyo before he opened Clovelly’s award-winning patisserie, Madame and Yves, in 2019, agrees we’re in the midst of a chocolate crisis.
“With chocolate prices so high, I’m cutting back on using it in my new creations,” Scherrer said. Two years into inflationary chocolate prices, there is only so much he pass on to his customers.
“The first year I absorbed the prices. But with dairy and labour going up on top of the crazy chocolate prices, our chocolate eclair is now $10.50 … They were around $7 when we first opened. Even at $10.50 we aren’t charging enough. The margin is so small, if we have wastage we’re losing money.”
Federico Zanellato, the owner-chef at Pyrmont’s chef’s-hatted LuMi Dining, understands the pricing dilemma. Zanellato’s spin-off venture, Lode Pies and Pastries, has also stuck with high-quality ingredients. At $8.50, Lode’s pain au chocolat may seem like a big money-spinner. But Zanellato said he’s lucky to make a dollar on the product.
The increasing trajectory of chocolate prices is largely the result of socio-economic factors on the other side of the world. With 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa supply grown in West Africa, a perfect storm of climate and economic change swept the region.
Gary Willis, who heads the chocolate and patisserie division at Mayers Fine Food, said it started with three years of bad weather in West Africa. “It was wet too long, then the dry winds came in early,” he said.
When drought followed, Willis said farmers – unfairly underpaid in an industry where even hedge funds are becoming involved in buying and selling chocolate – didn’t have money to invest in the pesticides and fertilisers needed to guard cocoa crops from disease.
There are other factors, too. “The farmers’ kids are better educated and want white-collar jobs,” Willis said. Cocoa processing plants are also losing their workforce to better paying jobs.
Declining cocoa yields also coincided with consumers in the world’s two most populous countries – China and India – getting a taste for chocolate, putting pressure on demand.
“Prices really hit the fan last year,” Willis said. Local retailers and restaurants adopted different strategies to cope with the surge. “Some have used cheaper compound chocolate, or they still use high quality but less [of it]. I’ve heard of patisseries using one layer of chocolate in its cakes where they used to have three. Some restaurants have taken chocolate off the menu altogether.”
On a trip to France, Kakawa Chocolates’ Jinsun Kim noticed chocolate bonbons had halved in size. While she hasn’t chased the trend, Kakawa has followed the strategy of supermarket brands by maintaining price but lowering volume. You can now buy Kakawa chocolate slabs in 80 grams rather than 100 grams.
Adora has taken a similar approach, holding firm on quality but offering pared-back sizes with its current Easter egg range. In a market where customers are still buying chocolates, but less often, Tina Angelidis was nervous when Adora tweaked its prices in January. “We were one of the last to do it,” she said.
“It took the industry so long to move to couverture and high quality, it’d be sad to see a move away from that,” Angelidis said. The chocolatier was disheartened when she visited a top-end Sydney restaurant, which she has chosen not to name, and the dessert menu championed its use of a mass-market supermarket chocolate brand.
Recovery from the mix of climate disasters and increased global demand for chocolate won’t be easy. “After you’ve planted new crops, they take three to four years to bear fruit,” Willis said.
Kakawa’s Kim said higher prices were easier to digest if farmers got a fair cut and child labour was weeded out of the cycle.
But Willis warned consumers needed to acclimatise to the cost of chocolate. “Prices will come down slightly, but they aren’t going back to where they were.”
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