The Chocolate That Isn’t: Why High Prices Are Breaking the Bar, and How the Future Lies in the Fruit

If you’ve picked up your favourite chocolate biscuit recently and noticed something different on the wrapper, you aren’t imagining things. A drastic shift is happening on supermarket shelves. Iconic treats like Nestlé’s Blue Riband and Toffee Crisp, and even McVitie’s Penguin bars, are losing the right to legally call themselves "milk chocolate."

They are now "chocolate flavoured."

This isn't just a marketing pivot, it is a symptom of a global cocoa crisis. As the price of cocoa beans skyrockets to unsustainable levels, manufacturers are cutting cocoa solids and swapping in cheaper vegetable fats just to keep prices palatable. While the industry scrambles to save the chocolate bar, a solution has been sitting on the forest floor all along.

The future of sustainable cocoa farming isn’t just about the bean. It’s about the fruit.

The Bean Crisis: Why Chocolate is “Disappearing”

For decades, the price of cocoa beans was relatively stable, hovering around £2,000 per metric ton. In early 2024 and into 2025, that reality shattered. Prices quadrupled, peaking at over £8,000 per ton before settling at a historically high "new normal" of around £4,000 ($5,700+) per ton.

The drivers are complex but undeniable: climate change, El Niño weather patterns, and aging trees in West Africa have decimated yields. When the harvest fails, the global commodity market panics, and the price of the bean becomes too expensive for mass-market confectioners to bear.

The result is an industry squeezed to its breaking point. Farmers are at the mercy of volatile commodity markets, and consumers are paying more for products that contain less and less actual cocoa.

The Forgotten 70%: Enter Cacaofruit

For 3,000 years, the world has been obsessed with the cocoa bean (the seed). But the bean represents only about 30% of the cacao fruit. The remaining 70% (a white, zesty, nutrient-rich pulp) is traditionally discarded, left to rot on the farm floor during the harvest.

This is where Kaoba is changing the paradigm.

Kaoba utilises the cacaofruit juice - the delicious, tropical nectar that surrounds the beans. By capturing this "waste," we are not just creating a refreshing new beverage; we are rewriting the economics of the cocoa farm.

Decoupling from the Bean: A New Revenue Stream

The most critical aspect of the Kaoba model is that the price of the pulp is not fixed to the price of the bean.

Cocoa beans are a global commodity. Their price is dictated by traders in London and New York, often leaving farmers with pennies on the dollar regardless of their hard work. The pulp, however, exists outside this volatile casino.

Because the industry has historically treated the pulp as waste, it has no "commodity price." This allows companies like Kaoba to establish direct, fair-trade pricing models for the pulp that are independent of the bean market.

Here is how this transforms the farmer's livelihood:

• Double Revenue: The farmer still sells their beans to the chocolate market at the current high prices.

• Zero Extra Land: They do not need to plant more trees or clear more forest to earn more money; they simply harvest the juice from the pods they are already opening.

• Stability: Even if the chocolate market crashes, the revenue from the fruit juice remains a stable, fixed income source.

Drinking the Solution

While the world worries about whether their chocolate bar is still real chocolate, Kaoba is proving that we can stabilise the industry by looking at the whole fruit.

Kaoba Sparkling Cacaofruit Juice is a celebration of what was once lost. It has a flavour profile entirely distinct from chocolate - think tropical lychee, pear, and citrus. Its true sweetness lies in its impact. Every can represents a farmer who was paid for all of their harvest, not just the seeds.

As the "chocolate" on our shelves changes, our approach to the ingredient must change with it. We cannot fix an unsustainable system by simply charging more for the beans. We fix it by valuing the whole fruit, ensuring that even when bean prices skyrocket, farmers have a safety net built right into the crop they are already growing.

The era of wasting 70% of the cacao fruit is over. Welcome Kaoba Cacaofruit Soda.