{"id":86700,"date":"2025-07-23T19:22:17","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T19:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/86700\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T19:22:17","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T19:22:17","slug":"hershey-says-it-is-hiking-chocolate-prices-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/86700\/","title":{"rendered":"Hershey says it is hiking chocolate prices"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 Your Kit Kat bar and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are officially getting pricier.<\/p>\n

Hershey told its retail partners it is raising prices by a percentage in the “lower double-digit range” over what its chocolate products cost over the past couple years, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNN. The culprit: high cocoa prices.<\/p>\n

Bloomberg first reported the increase.<\/p>\n

Cocoa futures rose a whopping 178% in 2024 after a 61% increase in 2023, according to data from FactSet. That’s because Ghana and Ivory Coast account for almost 60% of the world’s cocoa production, and the region has been hit by poor harvests due to weather exacerbated by climate change.<\/p>\n

For example, a study<\/a> led by Maximillian Kotz of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center found an early 2024 heat wave hit there was made 4 degrees Celsius hotter due to climate change. Cocoa prices that April soared 280%.<\/p>\n

Cocoa futures are currently trading for $8,156 per metric ton. Although that’s 30% lower than the record high of $12,646 per metric ton in December 2024, it’s still significantly higher than it was two years ago.<\/p>\n

Hershey noted in its statement that the price increase is not related to tariff or trade policies. In its earnings call in May, Hershey said it anticipated $15 million to $20 million in tariff costs in the second quarter of the year.<\/p>\n

The price increase “reflects the reality of rising ingredient costs, including the unprecedented cost of cocoa. (For years,) we’ve worked hard to absorb these costs and continue to make 75% of our product portfolio available to consumers for under $4.00,” a company spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

In its earnings call in May, the company said it would also adjust its “price pack architecture,” which basically means reducing the amount of product in a package, more colloquially known as “shrinkflation.”<\/p>\n

The benefit of this is “it’s not a direct price point increase, but rather, it’s kind of a combination of sizing and price, which can tend to offer perhaps a better value perception for consumers,” Michele Buck, Hershey’s CEO, said in an earnings call in May.<\/p>\n

Swiss chocolatier Lindt said in 2024 that it raised its prices and expected to continue into 2025, due to a “challenging year characterized by record-high cocoa costs, substantial price increases, and weakened consumer sentiment.”<\/p>\n

Contributing:<\/strong> John Towfighi, Lianne Kolirin and Erika Tulfo<\/p>\n

\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 Your Kit Kat bar and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are officially getting pricier. Hershey told…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":86701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,419,418,10109,746,990,421,420,425,50,422,423,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-86700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-cars","10":"tag-classifieds","11":"tag-climate","12":"tag-environment","13":"tag-food","14":"tag-homes","15":"tag-jobs","16":"tag-local","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-radio","19":"tag-salt-lake","20":"tag-sports","21":"tag-television","22":"tag-traffic","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-utah","27":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114904180251749874","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}