The cocoa market in France

Cocoa is one of the star products in many French shopping baskets.

Over 3,000 years ago, the pre-Olemic peoples discovered the cocoa treea fruit tree native to the tropical forests of America. Cocoa pods are the fruit of the cacao tree: they grow on the tree's branches or directly on the trunk. The Mayas and Aztecs are considered the first chocolate consumers. in pre-Columbian times, they perfected the first process for transforming cocoa beans into a chocolate drink. After harvesting, the cocoa beans were fermented in leaves, roasted and then hot-ground to a cocoa paste shaped into a cylinder.

Today, cocoa is a key product in the French diet. In fact, the French are among the top ten consumers of cocoa, with nearly 4.5 kg of chocolate per person per year.

Cocoa is the powder obtained by grinding cocoa beans, the fruit of the cacao tree. The cocoa industry is clearly divided into :

The upstream part, which consists of cultivating cocoa plantations, recovering the cocoa beans and drying them. This primary upstream industry is the virtual monopoly of developing countries;

The primary downstream part, which consists in transforming the raw beans into "cocoa mass", a semi-finished product used by the entire chocolate industry (cleaning, drying, roasting, etc.).this is a semi-finished product used by the entire chocolate industry (cleaning, drying, roasting, hulling and grinding), which sometimes takes place directly on the production site, but is more often the preserve of Western multinationals;

The secondary downstream part, which consists in the production of chocolate and other by-products that are ultimately distributed to end consumers. These secondary and tertiary activities are largely concentrated in developed countries;

Between these key segments of the cocoa value chain, there is of course the transport industry, particularly maritime transport, which links the different geographies involved.

The cocoa market is a globalized one, with the production side governed in particular by two countries, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, which together account for almost 60% of world cocoa production. The other key countries in world production are other African countries, South American countries and Indonesia. It should be noted that80%of global production comes fromfamily plantationssmaller than 10 hectares. Visitmilling activities largely concentrated concentrated on the European continentcloser to potential consumers.

from 2023 onwards, following crop failures due to global warming and in particular the El Niño storm in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, the relationship between supply and demand for cocoa became much tighter, leading to an explosion in cocoa market prices, from nearly 2.205 per tonne to 7,955 in November 2024.