The High Co$t of Expen$ive Cocoa: Part 1 | #PodSaveChocolate
Episode 35 of #PodSaveChocolate is a discussion about the current high cost of cocoa focusing more on why and how, than what.
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Link to watch and comment on LinkedIn.
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Episode 35 Overview
The high cost of cocoa has been at the forefront of industry – and in the backs of the minds and in the wallets of consumers – for close to a year now. An episode of TheChocolateLife:LIVE back in September of 2023 is where we first took a look at this phenomenon.
TheChocolateWire
Since then, futures prices climbing a distressing 185% year-to-date (2024) and a mind-boggling 345% over the past 12 months (since March 2023).
In this episode of #PodSaveChocolate we’ll not only take a look at what is happening but take a dive into why – and then examine what it could mean for the future of cocoa and chocolate.
Compiled by Nathaniel Lacsina, Senior Web Editor
Fuad Mohammed Abubakar
On LinkedIn, the author is the UK Head of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Co.
What No One Else Is Reporting!
Changing Industry Dynamics – Questions to Consider
The following questions are, for me, the most important things to consider when it comes to the current prices and the long-term effects.
- Do projects like the Be Slavery Free Chocolate Scorecard normalize industry practices in a way that can be seen to be regressive? (H/T Tim McCollum of Beyond Good for mentioning this point.)
- Are we at an inflection point with respect to how big cocoa does business?
- What could this mean for the future of tight government control?
- What do the current prices mean for specialty chocolate? (And what about alt.chocolates?)
- What are the lost opportunities – and the lost-opportunity costs?
- The potential impact of the 2024 US presidential election on costs.
An AI’s Takes on Visualizing Today’s Topic
I took a look through my standard stock image sources – Unsplash and Adobe Stock – for images I could use for the “hero” title image. None seemed appropriate. I was reminded of an update to the version of Photoshop I used and a notice for Adobe’s Firefly (generative AI) was presented and I decided to give it ago. All of the prompts incorporate “the high cost of expensive cocoa” and I played around with concepts, themes, styles, and lighting settings to generate about twenty different options. Below are some of the ones I did not choose for the hero position. I must admit I was curious to know what Firefly would render and I found some of the results to be absolutely hilariously inventive. But when asking to render realistic photos, the engine struggled, mightily. But, in general, I found Firefly faster to achieve a usable image than Dream Studio or Dall-E, though it’s also interesting to see how the different models render different images from the same prompts.
One thing the Firefly LLM is not aware of is the pentagonal geometry of cacao. Here there are six seeds; sometimes there were ten and the lack of knowledge is reflected in getting the ridge count on the exterior wrong, too.
Episode Hashtags and Related Accounts to Follow
#AdobeFirefly
#cocoa #cacao #cacau
#chocolate #chocolat #craftchocolate
#PodSaveChocolate #PodSaveChoc
#LaVidaCocoa #TheChocolateLife
Next Episode
The topic/guest for the Friday, April 19th episode of PodSaveChocolate was not finalized prior to the publication date of this post.
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Clay Gordon
Clay Gordon