There's a glut of old cocoa beans out there

 Via the Financial Times, this important news: 

A frantic hunt by chocolate manufacturers for high-grade cocoa has left a backlog of old, poor-quality beans lying in London’s warehouses, leading to a rare divergence in prices between the UK and the US.

Last month cocoa futures traded in New York rose strongly, peaking above $10,000 last week, while London prices fell, dipping below $6,400 earlier this month. Despite a sell-off in recent days, US prices are down just 3 per cent since the start of last month, compared with a 16 per cent drop for the UK contract.

Cocoa prices on both markets rallied strongly earlier this year, as poor weather and disease decimated crops in Ghana and Ivory Coast, where two-thirds of the world’s cocoa beans are grown, and as hedge funds piled into the market.

But the global shortage has led to a race among cocoa bean processors to secure high-quality beans, while shunning older varieties. Stocks of harvested beans are emptying, with US inventories at 15-year low and warehouses in London the lowest since 2021.

What is left in London is a “poisoned pill”, said Martijn Bron, who was global head of cocoa and chocolate trading for agricultural commodities giant Cargill until 2022.

The UK capital has historically been the market for large-scale purchasers of cocoa. But at the end of August more than one-quarter of the 54,650 metric tonnes of cocoa beans held in the London ICE exchange warehouses was more than three years old, according to exchange data. Moreover, almost 80 per cent of this older stock is bulk-stored beans grown in Cameroon, which is widely viewed in the industry as lower quality for making chocolate.

Never fear, chocolate manufacturers have solutions!: 

...Bigger companies may add a small amount of cheaper Cameroonian cocoa — which, with a better colour than taste, is normally used to make powders rather than chocolate — into a blend, but they are constrained by their own protocols on quality, said Thornton. Smaller or private companies, on the other hand, “have more flexibility to cut costs”, she said.

“This will change the taste, but to be honest, with milk chocolate, by the time you add the sugar and milk, you can almost get away with anything,” said Thornton.

It would be really interesting to understand who buys the lowest quality cocoa beans for their chocolate.