Odd Lots - This Is How The Chocolate Market Actually Works

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

When you're eating a chocolate bar, there's a good chance you're not thinking about the complex commodity market that allows cocoa beans to make it into a tasty snack. But obviously cocoa trading is a huge business. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak to professor Kristy Leissle, the author of the book “Cocoa,” about how this commodity market really works. She explains to us where it's grown, how pricing's determined, and the role of the major confectionery buyers in this market. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast feed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Allaway. You know, Tracy, there's some commodities out there that I feel like when people talk about them,

they don't always take them very seriously as commodities, as serious markets. I'm trying to think now, live hogs, maybe? Well, that's probably one. Another one I would say is the marijuana industry still, you know. But no, we're going to be talking about another commodity about which I feel like people often like to make jokes or maybe don't realize is very serious business. And that is cocoa. Coco. I love chocolate.

Yeah, exactly. See? You're proving my point, which is that as soon as the conversation turns to cocoa or chocolate, usually people still. start getting into some sort of aesthetic discussion about how much they love it, and, you know, which you never hear of, say, we're talking about copper or palladium. That's right. People don't start talking about their favorite, like, shades of metals when they're talking about precious metals. That's very true. Whereas I feel a very, very strong urge right now to talk about my favorite brands of chocolate, but I will resist. Well, it's not that it's irrelevant,

perhaps, to our conversation. But it is good to remind people that there's a very important. It's is a serious traded commodity market that underlies the chocolate that they love and has some very interesting market dynamics in terms of who supplies it, who grows it, who buys it, that makes it a perhaps more interesting story than just something very sweet and tasty to eat. Well, I'm intrigued. I think we should talk about the serious side of chocolate and I will try very, very hard not to make any jokes. Okay. Well, today we are going to, going to be talking to Christy Leslie. She is a professor at the University of Washington Botthel. And she is also the author of a book all about the cocoa market called Coco. I've

spoken to her on TV, on my TV show, What Do You Miss, that I co-host, about the incredible rally that we've seen this year in the price of cocoa. And I was so fascinated by the dynamics of the cocoa market that I wanted to learn more and really, dive into how this commodity market really works. Christy, thank you very much for joining us. Yeah, no, thanks for having me. It's great to talk again. And I really appreciate very much your comments about taking cocoa seriously.

When I did my PhD by studying cocoa and chocolate, it was actually pretty difficult to be taken seriously as a scholar, at least in the beginning, because people immediately wanted just as you say to start talking about their favorite chocolate. No, I imagine like if you had written, say, a book about how the soybean market or the corn market worked, no one would really question that it was serious scholarship and serious business. But of course, I guess if you write about chocolate, immediately people think maybe it's a bit more of a frivolity or something that is, yeah, not that serious. I really think so. And I think it's because people don't usually have the same kind of emotional relationship with soybeans or corn as they do with chocolate.

And so it's much easier for people, I think, to make the transition to thinking about those things as serious, traded goods. You know, but we have such a strong, we're passionate, we're collectively passionate about chocolate. So, you know, the first thing people think of is their own personal experience rather than maybe the larger economic context. Christy, I just realized something, which I should have said in the beginning. Where are we talking to you? Where are you based right now? So I am in Accra, which is the capital of Ghana in West Africa. And Ghana is the second largest cocoa-producing country in the world.

The first largest is Ivory Coast, which is right next door. And there's no cocoa in Accra itself. It's a very urban environment, so we don't see that many cocoa trees around. But not too far outside. There's quite a bit of cocoa. So I mentioned in the beginning that there were some interesting aspects with where cocoa is grown. You mentioned Ghana.

You mentioned Ivory Coast. What does the global distribution overall look like? How significant are these particular markets? What are some of the other big ones? And just sort of break down where our cocoa comes from overall. Yeah, that's so important to understanding this market. So just the cocoa is indigenous to the Amazon River Basin. So it was born in Central and South America.

And it was first cultivated in Central and South America. And that's important to know because, today, countries in that region don't actually produce a lot of cocoa. Today, West Africa is really the predominant producer region, but by a lot. So about three quarters of all the cocoa in the world now comes from Africa, and most of that is in West Africa. And so Ghana, Agri Coast is number one, Ghana is number two, and then Nigeria and Cameroon, also in the region, produce quite a bit of cocoa as well. So really between these four countries, we're looking at a vast amount of cocoa. The exception is Indonesia, which is the third largest producer in the world, about 9 or 10% of all

cocoa. And what you see in Indonesia, though, is a bit different kind of cocoa processing. And so the beans that come from Indonesia are typically not fermented. And that means they can be used only in a different way in the chocolate making process. So when you're looking at this foundation of the chocolate industry, we really have to look at Africa. So how did that happen? How did West Africa become the place for the majority of the world's cocoa production? It's an interesting story. You know, partly it is to do with colonialism. And so when Portugal and Spain decolonized the Americas, when they relinquish their colonies, there, it sort of coincided with a massive drop in production in the Americas. And that was for a

number of reasons. So you had two things happening at the, you know, around the same time, which was Portuguese and Spanish colonization and then subsequent decolonization, lost of production in the Americas. And at the same, around the same time or a little bit later, Britain and France, colonizing Africa, the thing that was happening, not maybe in the, background would not be the right way to describe it, but the thing that was happening in Europe at the time was that the chocolate industry was born and it was growing. So you can imagine the new chocolate companies, Cadbury among them, you know, Hershey a little bit later, had just discovered that they could sell chocolate, you know, and that it was extremely popular with people.

People started to develop a taste for it in Europe and they were looking at a situation where they just couldn't get the beans from the Americas to the same volumes as they'd produced previously and turned to Africa where there was a lot of enthusiasm for this new crop. Coco was making people more money here than other export crops they were growing at the time. The climate was really suitable for cocoa. And between the two of them, France and Britain could exert a lot of colonial power. And so you see this massive global shift. I mean, I've just described that to you in a minute or two, but really it happened over, over decades, if not a century or more.

So it wasn't an overnight shift, but that's the basics of it. So, Christy, the first time we talked and we were talking about the incredible rally that we had seen in Coco prices this year, how much of the pricing of cocoa is essentially just a function of the weather conditions, at any given time in West Africa? Yeah, it would be impossible for me to quantify it, so I couldn't put it in exact figure on how much is the weather. I tend to put more faith in the weather as the driver than maybe some other analysts.

I just don't see other factors contributing as much unless it's politics, really. So another big driver of price is the political situation in this part of the world. So, for example, during periods of conflict in Ivory Coast, even though Cocoa still moved out of the country, sometimes in very large quantities, when there was conflict and the possibility that Coco might not be getting out of Ivory Coast, then we saw that drive the price up as well. So, you know, really, it's anything that shortens supply, anything that makes supply potentially less. And really, that's weather and politics for the most part. So if I had a really good weather forecasting machine, would I be able to almost perfectly predict the cocoa price? No, because at the end of the day, we're dealing with people.

And so people, you know, the price doesn't happen kind of magically. It happens, but, you know, because people, traders and companies are making decisions about whether to buy or sell cocoa, right? And so, you know, they take into account much more than the weather. And one of the other things that they take into account, obviously, is demand. And so we could, we would also need to bring that input in as well. And demand can be, of course, another big price drive. The thing is about chocolate is that demand doesn't tend to diminish that much.

It's kind of steadily grows over time. And especially when new markets in Asia started to develop. And there we really mean China and India, we had an even kind of bigger boost in demand. And so, you know, demand influences price. If the big companies say they're not processing as much cocoa one year or to the next, that can also make a difference on price. but overall, you know, it's a pretty, people still like to eat chocolate and that's not going away. Christy, would we think of the price of a commodity?

I think sometimes we think that that price arrives kind of by magic, or at least I do. I sit at my Bloomberg terminal. I start typing in cocoa. It brings up a cocoa future and I can look at it on a chart. But of course, that price has to be derived from real people making real transactions on the ground buyers. and sellers. Walk us through the market structure a little bit. So a farmer in Ghana grows cocoa. Then what? What is the sort of supply chain at which the clearing price of cocoa is set? Yeah. And interestingly, you know, the price is set on the futures market, which is not people

operating on the ground. And so, you know, the people trading futures are not cocoa farmers. So there's two futures markets for Coco in New York and London. And the people making those decisions are definitely not the on-the-ground traders. They're futures traders. And so they're sitting at desks in New York and London making these decisions. So the price is set in a bit more of a top-down fashion. However, those traders rely on reports from people who are on the ground. And so those reports, of course, are about everything we've been talking about, the weather,

the productivity of trees. the farmer enthusiasm, the politics, right? So information from the ground feeds into those traders sitting at their dust in London and New York, but then the price is really set at that level. I'll answer your question and talk you through the steps. And just with the caveat that they're different in Ghana to in other countries. And the reason is because Ghana has a very highly regulated market where the government controls many aspects of the different.

trade of cocoa. And so the first thing that a farmer would do is they sell to a buyer. In Ghana, there are licensed buying companies. And so there's, you know, maybe two dozen of them that operate in the country. Maybe 10 or 12 of them are significant in terms of market share. And those buyers tend to, farmers organize in their villages and decide more or less together which of those buyers they're going to sell to. In the case of Ghana, those buying companies then sell their cocoa to Ghana cocoa board, which is a government body, and then cocoa board exports it. So Ghana has a little bit of a different structure than some of the other places which are not as highly regulated. So is the majority of cocoa production in Africa then, is that still mostly done

on an independent basis? Do we not have big corporate plantations? And if not, why hasn't that happened? Because you would assume that, you know, companies that are demanding large amounts of cocoa would try to secure their supply. Yeah, that's a great question. There's very little plantation agriculture in cocoa. And so you tend not to see the big kind of corporate plantations that you, that you're talking about. They exist. They're around. And they might not even be owned by a chocolate company. They might just be owned by a wealthy individual or a private company. But 90, 95 percent, the estimates vary of all cocoa is grown by small holders. And so we're talking about individual farmers who may farm their own land or rent it out to someone else to farm,

but very, very, very small amounts. And so, you know, to get back to Joe's question from earlier, there's five million estimated cocoa farmers in the world. Each one of them is selling to a buyer, and of course there are fewer numbers of buyers, but still a lot. And then from there on up, we start to see the trading structure narrow really, really quickly. So we're talking about millions of farmers at the base, probably millions of traders also who they're selling to, and then we start to see the number of actors involved and diminish pretty rapidly. I want to ask another question about the supply side, and that is the degree of labor intensiveness of the crop. I know there's some crops like grains where you don't need a lot of labor can be done with a lot of machinery.

How labor intensive is the actual planting and collecting of cocoa? It's really labor intensive. And it's such a good question because I think, you know, if you think about the crops that we, you know, grow in America, weed and soy and even corn, they can be mechanized. mechanized so much more easily, you know, and so wheat is a really nice comparison because, you know, wheat's been basically engineered to all grow at the same height and all ripen at the same time so that a harvesting machine can just go through that field and cut off all of the ripe, you know, wheat grains, you know, at the same time, the opposite is true for cocoa. So, you know, the trees do not, The pods, the cocoa pods do not all ripen at the same time.

The tree, they ripen pretty much year round. There's no real way to mechanize the harvest. It's got to be done by hand. So each of those cocoa pods is pretty big. Some of them can get almost as big as like an American football, and they're about the same shape. And so they grow on the trunk. They grow on some of the larger branches.

And you can imagine you've got these big parts. pods sticking out from all around the tree, including on the trunk. I mean, how could you mechanize that? And so really, it's the labor of harvest. It's the labor of breaking open those pods and scooping the seeds out. And, of course, all of the farm labor that goes into it. So imagine you're in a tropical rainforest. That's Coco's home.

That's where it's indigenous to rainforest. That's not an easy environmental work. And everything wants to grow there, everything. And so, you know, a lot of cocoa farm labor is just keeping the farm clean, you know, doing the weeding, which is not like pulling out a dandelion flower. We're talking about some pretty hefty weeds that need constant removal and maintenance. So I think pretty labor intensive is the short answer to your question. So before we move on to the demand side, I have one more question on production related to your point about labor. intensiveness. You mentioned that the price of cocoa, it's set on the futures market way out in the

west, but the people setting that price rely on on the ground reports about production. I'm just wondering how much of the futures prices that are set actually trickled down to cash payments for the farmers. Is it possible that there's a big rise in the futures price for cocoa, but that doesn't necessarily entirely filter down to the farmers? There is a relationship. And so, you know, if we take Ghana out of the equation, because here in Ghana, the government sets the producer price every year. And so they say how much the farmers are going to get.

And while that price does generally follow the futures price, because they set the price per season, which is, you know, October through March-ish is the productive time, you know, the, futures price might change a lot during the season, but that price is fixed. for the duration. There's a similar situation in Ivory Coast where they set a minimum price. It's not as enforced. It's not enforced as well as it isn't gonna.

But in all of these cases, you have the futures price setting the, that's the starting point, right? And over time, as the futures price moves up and down, we see what we call farm gate prices, which is the price that the farmer actually receives, you know, when she or he sells their cocoa, we see Farmgate prices also move with the futures price. But as you can imagine, it doesn't happen instantaneously.

And it's also because we're dealing with 5 million cocoa farmers in the world and no real mandate to collect all the price information from them, it's a little bit challenging to say exactly how much Farmgate price changes and when it changes when the futures price changes. but generally over time, we do see the two following each other. I'm June Grasso, inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Law podcast. Every weekday, we help you make sense of the legal stories that shape the nation and the world. Listen for complete analysis of the biggest court cases, the latest actions from Congress and regulators, and the legal moves driving the markets.

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That's the Bloomberg Law podcast with me. me, June Grasso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcast. Let's talk a little bit about who is buying the cocoa. So we've established that so much of the world's cocoa comes from a few specific locations, highly concentrated. The buying is also, I imagine, pretty concentrated. What percent of the world's cocoa is bought by a few big suites companies like Nestle and Cadbury, I imagine, that we're all familiar with. Oh, most of it. So, you know, if we look at the structure of the industry, I said it narrows on the way up. And so you've got millions of cocoa farmers. But then at the other end, you just got a very few

companies who predominate. And so, of course, there are lots of chocolate companies. There are lots of cocoa processors, but when we look at the big ones, the ones with the really the significant market share in any way, what we call them mature chocolate markets, which are the kind of oldest industrial chocolate markets in Europe and North America, we're looking at five chocolate companies and three processors. And so between these companies, they are really doing most of the buying. They're not the only ones, obviously, but they're the biggest ones. So those are the fundamental sources of demand, those big chocolate companies buying up cocoa, but are there speculative sources of demand or speculative entities that are also having an impact on price?

Because when it comes to commodities, one of the conversations that we're always having is, you know, paper versus physical price and the degree to which speculative traders are actually impacting prices away from actual on-the-ground demand. The futures market for cocoa is definitely populated by speculators as well as hedgers. You know, when we say hedgers on that market, we're talking about the big chocolate companies and the big processors who are hedging their bets against a future price rise by buying, you know, on the futures market. But absolutely speculators are active in Coco futures. And the reason for that is because, I mean, as we've been talking about this whole time,

Coco is a commodity. Its price is volatile. And anytime you have a volatile price for a good, you've got the opportunity to place a bet on it and potentially have a pretty big payoff. And so for sure, I mean, Coco is very popular amongst speculators. And in those cases, they rely on the same information coming from the ground. You know, they also need to be informed about about disease outbreaks amongst cocoa trees, which we haven't really talked about. need to be informed about weather, they need to be informed about politics. They're using all that same information, but not because they want to make chocolate, but because they want to make a well-educated yes on what's going to happen to that price. And so for sure, for sure. You know, with various

commodities, of course, there are certain data points that people look at to sort of establish the fundamentals of supply and demand with corn and wheat. We might look at acreage or, or plantings. And with oil, people might look at the latest rig count data in the U.S. I know in the cocoa market, because I see the headlines from time to time, there's something called the grindings data. But I don't even know what that is. What is the grindings data and what is that information telling us? What is grinding? So grindings happen after the farm. So on the farm, cocoa is still an agricultural commodity. Once it gets into a factory, it starts to change into a manufactured good, right? A manufactured item, just like a toy or electronics or manufactured.

Chocolate is manufactured. And the first step is grinding the beans. And so cocoa beans are really the seeds of the fruit. And so that's what we make chocolate out of is the seed. They're pretty big seeds. They're like maybe a bit bigger than an almond usually. And those, those seeds are fermented usually and then dry. And then they're really, really, really hard, like a pebble. And you've got to grind them down. And so you, that's the first step into making them usable. So you could eat one in its just sort of whole state, but you wouldn't have a very, maybe, like, emotional experience with that. And you couldn't need a lot of them.

So the way we get Coco to be usable is we grind it. And it grind down so, so, so fine to such a small particle size that it turns into almost a liquid. It's like a paste. And then from that paste is where we can start to make all chocolate and chocolate confectionery goods. So grinding really refers to that step of grinding the bean down, like very literally. And of course, like symbolically,

grindings is demand because you wouldn't be grinding beans down at all if people weren't demanding chocolate. Just clarify, so when we see the grinding data flashing through the terminal, that is a proxy for demand, basically. Absolutely, yes, because how could you measure, right? You couldn't really measure everybody's demand for chocolate. You know, we have a vague idea of it. But the way you measure it is by how much the big processors and chocolate makers, how much cocoa they're grinding, they're grinding based on their own assessments of how much chocolate people are going to buy from them. It's very hard for me not to make a juvenile comment about grinding data flashing across the Bloomberg terminal. But I'm going to try just to go back to the

evolution of the market. We were talking about speculative forces. I seem to recall a trader, a big commodities trader called Anthony Ward, better known as Chalkfinger. And I think he said he was going to stop trading chocolate because there was too much algorithmic trading in the market. So commodities trading advisors, for instance, CTAs coming into the market and just changing the way it works. Is that something you've observed as well, Christy? The algorithmic trading? Yeah, in the futures market. Yeah. And I mean, so I won't pretend to be able to explain that aspect, but there, you know, I was actually just reading about it this morning. I try to read the Cocoa News every day, and there's actually a few articles out about this algorithmic trading. And yes, it happens. And yes,

it is computer programming, making predictions, you know, and taking some of maybe the guessing away from human beings. And I think a couple of things about that. You know, one, is it further divorces people from, you know, on the trading side, the futures trading side, from the experience of coco farming. I mean, they're already pretty far away from it. But that algorithmic trading, you know, makes it even that much more distant. And I think probably much easier for people to forget them that they're talking about real farmers, like real live human beings whose livelihood depends on, you know, in some ways now what an algorithm tells us. At the same time, those algorithms are using the same data that we've always used. And maybe the data

is becoming more abundant. Maybe it's becoming more precise, you know, in terms of weather forecasting and things like that. But it's still going to, I don't think there's been a fundamental change, you know, in how we predict what the price of cocoa is going to do. I mean, there's lots of variables, but there's only so many that are really meaningful. So, Christy, before we wrap up here, what is the next big thing that people in the cocoa market are thinking about and watching for these days? The big word that we hear about all the time, in the cocoa industry and have been for some time now is this is sustainability and how sustainable is this crop and there's lots of ways to measure sustainability but what the big companies have chosen

these big companies that I was talking about you know the five chocolate manufacturers and the three processors and other large players they're basing sustainability on on cocoa yields and by yields I mean how much fruit is any cocoa tree growing right and so if you're yielded are increasing, that means more pods on those trees and maybe more beans inside those pods. And that is what the big companies want. And so what we've seen recently, you know, really recently in the last couple of weeks, but also based on, you know, conversations over the last few years is that for the big companies, sustainability in cocoa really means increasing yields.

And that is hugely problematic from a number of perspectives, but mainly from the perspective of a cocoa farmer. And I'll just really briefly describe what that scenario would look like. And so there was a big World Cocoa Conference in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. And one of the goals that came out of it was to double yields. If we doubled the amount of cocoa being grown in the world, there is only one price outcome. And that is a fall. There is no possible scenario where demand for chocolate rises so much that it

counteracts the, you know, the price fall that would come from doubling yields. And so my question, really, you know, as we move forward into this in this conversation in the industry, is how does doubling cocoa yields help a farmer? If they, even if they grew twice as much cocoa, they would be looking at a price that was a fraction of the value of what it is now. And I just don't think that math works. I don't think the math of doubling how much cocoa. you're growing works out to a better income for a farmer if the price has been utterly devastated by a superabundance of high. And so, you know, right now I think we're in a moment in the cocoa and chocolate industries really where people are just struggling to come up with a solid, practical,

you know, usable definition of sustainability. And so far, I don't think increasing yields is is our answer. So lots of work remaining to be done on that question for sure. Christy, one more question before you go. We've been building up to this moment, your favorite chocolate. I knew it was coming. I will give you the real honest answer. And so I, whatever chocolate I'm eating in that moment, I love chocolate so much. It has been my favorite food from my whole entire life. And I don't even really care if it's dark or milk or white. Like, I just, I eat it every day. And so I'll tell you what I ate today. There's a new company in Ghana's called niche, and I ate some of their 38% milk chocolate. And that was my favorite today because I ate it today.

So tomorrow it might be a different one. Christy, this was a fascinating conversation. And I already can't wait to have you back again on the podcast, maybe in a couple years as we see the evolution of these yields. Thank you so much for joining. Oh, it was a lot of fun to talk. Thank you so much. Tracy, what is your favorite kind of chocolate? Oh, do you really want to know, Joe?

Because I'm going to give you, like, a massive list. No, I do, I do. You're ready? Yeah. I like green and blacks. I like Milka. I like anything from Jack Torres in New York. There's one close to the Bloomberg office,

so, you know, if you're looking for a present for me, you can go there. I like Toyshire in. in Switzerland. I like Mozart Kugln in Austria. I can keep going, by the way, but I better stop. This is amazing. I had no...

I mean, I guess I think I knew that you liked chocolate. I didn't realize you liked it with this degree of specificity and granularity. I think about it a lot. As for my own personal taste, I don't really eat chocolate that much, but for me, the darker is better at. See, I was going to ask,

but I knew you would say that. Wait, so what do you like? The darker, the better. Darker the better. Okay, I'll remember that. Yeah. I'll bring you some from the next chocolate friendly destination I go to. Please do.

But seriously, I found that conversation fascinating. And you're right, the chocolate market is defined by some very, very specific factors like the weather and a few big buyers in the form of the chocolate companies. But it's also a really interesting structure with this network of mostly independent farmers and the way that interacts with the futures market. Yeah, absolutely. That's what, you know, as I was kind of getting it in the beginning, to some extent, all commodities get reduced to some price that we could chart on this screen. But the origin of those prices is different for all of them. So you might have very industrialized

commodities, but then other ones where you have someone on a phone calling up local sources asking them what their latest price was, or in this case, a network of 5 million cocoa farmers around the world, what the prices said at local gates or local markets. So I love learning about the actual derivation of these prices that we take for granted. Yes, and I have a newfound appreciation for the grinding reports. I do too. I can't say it with a straight thing. Sorry.

Let's leave it there. This has been another edition of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you can follow Christy on Twitter at Doc of Chalk, cleverly enough.

And you should follow our producer, Tofer Forges at Forges T, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all.

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