As cocoa price soars, chocolate makers devour substitutes
Chocolate makers in the fast-growing Asian market are replacing a bigger proportion of cocoa butter, which gives confectionery its melt-in-the-mouth texture, with cheaper palm oil-based alternatives.
The move will help confectioners keep down prices in the price-sensitive region where chocolate sales are forecast to grow more than 5% this year to about 917,000 tonnes, according to market researcher Euromonitor International.
Palm oil-based butter mimics the taste of cocoa butter but is much cheaper. Higher demand for butter alternatives, known as cocoa butter equivalent (CBE), has pushed prices up by about 10% to $3,300 a tonne in the past year, but this is still more than $4,000 below the price of butter from cocoa beans.
Cocoa beans are processed into roughly equal parts butter and powder, which is used in cakes, biscuits and drinks.
Chocolate typically contains about 20% cocoa butter, so confectioners in Asia and Europe looking to save money can replace about a quarter of the cocoa butter with something else.
“The whole thing is about affordability – there’s no point in paying so much,” said Mohammad Jaaffar Ahmad, chief executive of the Palm Oil Refiners Association of Malaysia.
Source: reuters
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