Chocolate’s supply chain is vulnerable to changes in weather, farming practices, and global trade networks. It is a truly global product, with the beans mostly grown in developing nations and processed into chocolate in wealthy nations.
Supply chain challenges include problems with cultivation, trade, sustainability, and compliance.
Threats to production
Cocoa farmers are reportedly abandoning their trees or choosing not to replace ageing trees as the crop becomes less profitable due to rising production costs and declining yields.
In Côte d’Ivoire, for example, prolonged droughts, unpredictable rainfall, and increased plant diseases like swollen shoot disease have made cocoa farming unprofitable for many, leading farmers to leave their plantations or switch to alternative crops.
In Ghana, the world’s second largest cocoa producer, gold mining is now impacting cocoa production and taking over fertile land once used for cocoa growing.
The Swiss media outlet Swissinfo reported in 2022 that cocoa farmers were selling their land to illegal gold miners, with swathes of farmland transformed into wastelands dotted with piles of clay contaminated with mercury, a by-product of gold extraction.
In the same year, a survey by the Ghanaian cocoa board revealed that 19,000 hectares of cocoa plantations had been lost, taken over or damaged by illegal gold mining.
With recent large increases in the price of gold and more problems with cocoa production due to disease and climate change, there is increasing recognition that more cocoa farmland will be lost to mining in 2026..
With production declining, cocoa prices are rising. They increased by 25% in the two years to 2024.
Prices have since stabilised somewhat, but cocoa futures today are still more than three times higher than they were in 2021 – 2023.
Read more: 🍏The surprising link between illegal gold mining and chocolate 🍏
Threats to trade and compliance
Estimates indicate that over 1.5 million children are involved in child labor on cocoa farms in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, with many engaged in hazardous work, and there have been documented cases of both child and adult workers being subjected to exploitative or slave-like conditions in other cocoa-producing countries as well.
In 2023, the commodities trader Cargill was ordered to pay more than $120,000 by a Brazilian court after prosecutors alleged it did not know the extent of child labour in its Brazilian cocoa supply chains because it purchases from hundreds of producers, co-operatives and merchants. Cargill denied the allegations.
In 2021, Hershey and the Rainforest Alliance were sued for false advertising in the US, with Hershey accused of turning a blind eye to child labour in their supply chain and the Rainforest Alliance accused of being unable to prevent or even account for it.
Certification schemes like Rainforest Alliance and FairTrade are supposed to give assurance of ethical work practices in the production of the certified foods, but their efficacy has been questioned.
Researchers who reviewed the ability of schemes like FairTrade to assure child-labour-free processes in 2018 were told by a certifier “We are working with around 11,800 cocoa farmers, so we have not been able to visit any farms as of now”. Instead, they relied on farmers’ cooperatives to verify the working standards at farms.
The cooperatives receive a premium for certified cocoa, compared to uncertified cocoa, so self-reporting about their farmers’ compliance with certification standards for labour practices is problematic.
In 2025, the bigger concern with compliance and sustainability in cocoa is related to the coming enforcement of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Under these rules, due to be enforced from December 2025, cocoa and chocolate products imported into the EU must be proven to be deforestation-free, meaning the land used for cocoa production has not been deforested after 2020.
The importer must provide geolocation data, traceability to farm level, and comprehensive documentation at multiple points in the supply chain.
In West Africa, the major growing region, there are significant differences between the way beans are regulated and priced between the two largest producers, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Some cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire sell their beans to traffickers who smuggle them out of the country to be resold in places such as Guinea and Liberia, where they can fetch a higher price than the government-mandated prices in their country. In 2024, 150,000 tonnes of Ivorian cocoa beans were said to have been illegally exported in this way.
Threats to forests
Liberia, they say, has “an almost total lack of monitoring”, making it attractive for farmers who grow beans on newly deforested land there, before moving the beans back into Cote d’Ivoire to avoid traceability checks. Tens of thousands of cocoa farmers have reportedly crossed the border already, threatening thousands of hectares of virgin forest.
Chocolate and food fraud
Fraud in cocoa beans can take the form of theft, smuggling, misrepresentation of fairtrade/rainforest status, false organic claims or misrepresentation of geographical origin; as well as simpler frauds such as adding rocks or sticks to bags of beans to increase their weight.
The EUDR, which includes significant traceability requirements and penalties for cocoa beans from recently deforested land, creates significant pressure on cocoa bean producers and traders to falsify bean origin and traceability data to make beans appear to have originated in non-deforested or ‘low-risk’ designated areas.
There is significant smuggling of cocoa beans between West African countries, due to price differences between countries, and this confounds traceability attempts.
In addition to fraud in cocoa beans, manufactured chocolate also has food fraud challenges.
Counterfeit chocolate – chocolate products packaged to look like premium brands but made without the permission of the brand owner – is perhaps the most commonly reported type of fraud in chocolate.
A notorious example of counterfeit chocolate is ‘Wonka’ bars, which periodically resurface in the United Kingdom. The Wonka brand is owned by Ferrero, which hasn’t sold Wonka chocolate bars in the United Kingdom for years.
The fake bars are produced or repackaged by unregistered businesses or individuals with no regard for hygiene or labeling regulations, making them potentially unsafe to eat, particularly for people with food allergies due to undeclared allergens. Incidents have included unhygienic manufacturing conditions, incorrect or missing ingredient lists, and the use of fake business addresses on packaging.
Dubai-style chocolate products have also been counterfeited, including some that had to be recalled due to the presence of undeclared peanuts, almonds, cashews, and walnuts.
Other frauds that have been unmasked include an ‘artisan’ producer in Italy who was allegedly buying industrially produced Easter chocolates, discarding the wrapping and then reselling them as ‘own production’ (i.e., artisanal); and smuggling operations.
In January 2025, a woman was caught in Germany with 460 bars of chocolate concealed in her luggage after an international flight. Customs officials suspect the chocolate bars were being imported for commercial sale, because of the large number of bars and because chocolate of that type had been made popular on TikTok, with each bar fetching around 25 euros.
The bars had no ingredient or allergen information on their packs, posing a health risk to consumers. If successful, the smuggling would have resulted in the woman evading more than 330 euros of import duties.
In February 2025, authorities in Europe discovered chocolate from the United Arab Emirates and Turkiye made with hydrogenated palm oil instead of cocoa fat, containing undeclared colourants and with a higher fat content than declared.
And in July 2025, Dubai-style chocolate from Turkiye was found to contain undeclared colourants (green mulberry leaf, brilliant blue FCF (E 133)) in Dubai chocolate.
It’s likely these frauds are just the tip of the iceberg. I estimate there are many instances of inauthentic claims made about artisanal and boutique chocolate products in wealthy countries. ‘Single origin’ chocolate, organic chocolate and fair trade chocolate products are moderately likely to be affected by inaccurate claims due to problems in their supply chains or intentional deception by the brand owner.
This article was originally published at The Rotten Apple – a weekly newsletter for food professionals
