The cut to next season's projected global surplus in six months — 267,000 tonnes in January to 25,000 in July. Two revisions, one weather pattern, and a market that spent the first half of the year positioned for abundance.
What is moving the market
Six forces, pulling in both directions. The market is caught between a visibly well-supplied present and a forecast shortfall.
Map of cocoa production, export ports and shipping lanes
Amber circles are producing districts, sized by output. Teal rings are processing capacity. Solid dots are ports. Lanes show the dominant bean routes.
Colour is direction, not judgment. A short crop is bad news for a buyer and good news for a futures holder — the map takes no side. Dashed outline means no second source exists, so no spread can be computed.
The season clock
Cocoa runs on a hard annual cycle. Drag the hand, or the slider, to move through the 2025/26 season and see what was actually known on any date.
The line is the ICCO daily price, averaged by month. Hollow marks are individual ICE New York settlements — a different basis, which is why they disagree: the monthly series bottoms in March at $3,240, the lowest daily close was $2,952 on 24 February. Ticks along the bottom mark the events above.
Where the consensus is unstable
A source revising itself is one signal. Two sources disagreeing is another.
The gap between two estimates, relative to their midpoint. Where only one source exists there is nothing to compare — Nigeria is the clearest case.
Supply balance
Net world crop minus grindings. The 2023/24 deficit was the largest in the modern record; what followed has been repeatedly revised.
2024/25 has been revised three times in twelve months — 49 kt, then 75 kt, back to 48 kt. Forward seasons are StoneX projections.
Across two revisions StoneX raised the current season from 247 kt to 422 kt while cutting next season from 149 kt to 25 kt. The surplus has not disappeared — it has been pulled forward. Production for 2026/27 is now seen down 6% at 4.83 Mt against demand near 4.75 Mt.
Supply
West Africa is roughly 60% of world output, and the two dominant producers have both guided next season materially lower.
| Origin | 2024/25 | 2025/26 | 2026/27 f | Change | Constraint |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ivorian 2025/26 is cumulative port arrivals to 2 August, not full-season production. Ghana's 2026/27 figure is COCOBOD's internal estimate of 20 August; their public guidance three weeks earlier was 450–550 kt and StoneX has 586 kt. Indonesian and Brazilian tonnages are blank — see the note below. | |||||
Ivorian arrivals
The clearest evidence of a well-supplied present. Arrivals have run ahead of last season all year.
Ghana, delivered
A strong recovery from 597 kt. COCOBOD now guides 450–550 kt for 2026/27.
Exchange stocks
Covers only exchange-certified cocoa at US and EU delivery ports, not commercial inventory.
The origins are changing places
West Africa still sets the price, but it no longer accounts for all of the change. Two of the three origins below are moving fast, and the third has left the export market entirely.
A warning about Indonesian numbers
Indonesia's official statistics agency put 2023 production at 641,700 tonnes, with Central Sulawesi alone at 130,800. Trade-house and exchange-facing estimates of Indonesian tradeable output run a small fraction of that. The gap is definitional — wet or unfermented farm-gate weight against fermented, dried, exportable beans — but it is large enough that quoting the official figure next to an ICCO balance would be misleading. This site leaves the Indonesian tonnage blank rather than pick a side. It is a good illustration of why origin-side measurement, done consistently, is worth paying for.
Demand
Grindings are the best available proxy for chocolate demand, and the regions have decoupled: Europe is contracting into its worst run in years while Asia rebounds hard.
Europe's 316 kt is the weakest second quarter since 2020, and first-half volume is down 7.8% year on year. Read the North American number with care: the NCA reporting panel changed after Q3 2025 and Hershey no longer participates, so the +7.65% is not a clean comparison.
| Region | Q2 2026 | y/y | H1 2026 | H1 y/y |
|---|
Origin grinding is taking share
Côte d'Ivoire processed 161 kt domestically in Q2, up from 125 kt a year earlier, as producing countries push value addition onshore. Over time this moves the demand signal upstream, away from the European association data the market has always relied on — a slow erosion of the market's own visibility.
Price
A 77% collapse, then a near-doubling. Cocoa has been the most violent soft commodity of the decade and positioning is thin.
Thirty-one months of the ICCO daily price, monthly-averaged. Peak $10,750 in January 2025, trough $3,240 in March 2026. Single-day ICE settlements run lower at the extremes — $2,952 on 24 February, and $12,931 at the December 2024 record.
NY Dec 2026
London Sep 2026
Off record high
Off 2026 low
The positioning risk
Speculative sentiment turned net short in early 2026 and open interest has been falling — 215,408 contracts on 10 August, a ninth consecutive decline and down 6.5% in under two weeks. A heavily short, thinning market meeting a downgraded crop forecast is the setup for the kind of counter-trend squeeze already seen in May. The 11 August session moved 6.4% in a day with no confirmed fundamental trigger.
Farmgate and policy
Prices at origin are administered, not discovered. That makes the gap between official price and world price the most informative number in West African cocoa — and the driver of cross-border leakage.
| Origin | Main crop | Revised | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reports of the Ivorian mid-crop cut vary between CFA 1,200 and 1,300 per kg. Both countries hold unsold stock — roughly 100 kt in Côte d'Ivoire, 50 kt at Ghanaian ports — and Abidjan committed CFA 280 bn to buy it back at the guaranteed price. | |||
The season calendars are merging
Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire have agreed to align the 2026/27 marketing year to a single 1 September – 31 August window and to harmonise guaranteed farmgate prices. Staggered seasons and divergent fixed prices are precisely what has historically driven physical smuggling across the shared border, so alignment is aimed squarely at closing that arbitrage.
EUDR lands mid-season
Plot-level geolocation becomes mandatory for large and medium operators on 30 December 2026, with micro and small enterprises following on 30 June 2027. The bind is that farmgate prices were cut 28.6% and 57% this season, so producers are being asked to fund mapping compliance out of sharply reduced income — with a Commission simplification review still capable of moving the requirements.
What resolves next
The gap between the well-supplied present and the forecast shortfall closes on a known schedule.
Source ledger
Every figure on this page traces to a row here, with its publication lag. The bars are why an origin-side panel has value: the fast sources are all downstream of the farm.
| Source | Provides | Cadence | Class | Typical lag |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lag is time from the event to public availability, not to revision-final. ICCO balance figures in particular revise for a year or more after first publication. | ||||