Why your Easter egg is more expensive and probably contains less cocoa (2025)

This Easter, your egg is hiding a bitter truth: chocolate is getting less chocolatey. We know Easter eggs are getting more expensive – according to a recent Which? investigation, they are 50 per cent more expensive than last year, while also shrinking in size. At Tesco, a Twix white chocolate egg went from £5 for 316g to £6 for 258g in just a year, and, in Morrisons, a 200g Cadbury Creme Egg five-pack increased in price from £2.62 last year to £4 this year.

But check the ingredients list, and you’ll be in for another shock. In certain bars, the percentage of cocoa has also been reduced. “My Green and Black milk chocolate used to be 100 grams a bar, and it was a 40 per cent cocoa,” says Jennifer Earle, a chocolate consultant and an international judge of chocolate quality. “[In 2018] it went from 90 grams and 37 per cent.” Cadbury‘s Dairy Milk bar has also reduced its cocoa content from 26 per cent in 2013 down to 23 per cent. Although Mondalez International, the owner of both Cadbury’s and Green & Blacks, says “the cocoa content has not changed for several years.”

The chocolate crisis has been brewing for the past three years. Cocoa prices are three times higher than pre-pandemic, thanks to a series of bad harvests in West Africa, which produces the majority of the world’s cocoa. In December 2024, the price of cocoa beans reached an all-time high, surpassing $12,000 per metric ton, a massive increase from around $2,000 in 2022. At the time of writing, the prices have calmed but remain high at $6,000.

“We’re going to see more climate change causing havoc with harvests, which will also mean more political unrest across Africa and South America, all the places where cocoa is growing,” says Brett Beardsell, a chocolate manufacturing consultant who has been in the industry for 30 years. “I’m pretty pessimistic. I don’t think we are ever going to return to the prices that we saw a couple of years ago.”

The bars being filled with biscuit, wafer… and air

Beardsell, who has worked with McVities and Hotel Chocolat over the years, works to help big brands find ingenious ways to reduce the amount of cocoa used in chocolate bars without breaking strict food standard rules. “The UK’s chocolate is different to the US, for example, because our chocolate is defined by legislation. There are things called ‘reserve descriptions’, so if you want to call something milk chocolate it has to have a minimum cocoa level.”

Our laws state that for a bar to be labelled “chocolate” it must be made using cocoa butter, and contain at least 25 per cent cocoa solids – or a minimum of 20 per cent cocoa butter in the case of white chocolate, which is made without cocoa solids.

If it isn’t made with cocoa butter, it is dubbed “cooking chocolate”, a chocolate-flavored compound made with various fats. “You cannot legally call it milk chocolate or white chocolate,” Beardsell says. These rules prevent British chocolate brands such as Cadbury’s from having the weak, synthetic taste that is often found in American chocolate.

However, only chocolate bars or novelty chocolate, such as Easter eggs or boxes of chocolate, are covered by these rules. So many snack brands have already ditched cocoa butter, as the price of it soars – and are using cheaper alternatives. “It can be on biscuits, it can be on wafers, it can be on cakes. Where chocolate is a component of the finished product, and not 100 per cent of it, we are absolutely seeing a stock speed towards chocolate-flavored coatings instead.”

These brands are also using thinner coatings and using more filling such as biscuits or caramel. “Brands can demand the same price at the till for a crispy bar over a 100 per cent chocolate bar. It’s more profitable because crispy bars cost less.”

Why brownies are under threat

Manufacturers of pure chocolate bars can’t completely scrap cocoa butter from their recipes, so instead, they are experimenting with reducing the cocoa content and replacing it with alternatives such as the caramel-like carob powder. They are being forced to be inventive, says Beardsell. “I’m seeing more and more brands trying to aerate chocolate. You can create big bubbles like an Aero bar, or there are techniques to micro aerate it, producing very, very small bubbles that are invisible. This means it’s the same volume of chocolate, but you are using less cocoa.”

Earle warns that smaller chocolate brands and independent chocolatiers could soon be pushed from the market. “It’s hard for bakeries to produce chocolate brownies. They’ve already managed to find customers who will pay more and appreciate their product, but they’re not making the same margins anymore, and getting people to pay more for chocolate is already tricky.”

In the near future, Earle predicts that many of these bakeries will either be forced to stop offering chocolate products or close down entirely. Small, independent chocolatiers across the country have already warned they are finding it impossible to absorb the costs of the rising cocoa prices, with many struggling to break even.

The price of chocolate is likely to remain high, and as a result, quality is likely to keep falling. “Chocolate used to be the preserve of the rich. From the 70s onwards, it was commoditised and readily available,” says Beardsell. “I think we might be about to swing back the other way. It’ll be less of a commodity. It’ll be both produced and purchased less often. Sadly, that’s the forecast.”