I thought I remember there being a cocoa shortage like a year or two ago. But this year there's expected to be a surplus because the weather in The Ivory Coast has been pretty good and bumper crops should be bountiful. Plus there has been a slight decrease in consumption of chocolate (candy). So cocoa prices have gone down . But I noticed on reddit there was an article in r/science posted about the health benefits of cocoa in mice (with implications for humans).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33711421/

It turns out cocoa reduces weight gain and can help undo fatty liver disease in mice fed with high-fat diets. And that coincidence pulled at the conspiracy part of my brain.

I haven't found any evidence but I'm wondering if there isn't a push to get people eating cocoa again. They need to increase consumption in order to offset overproduction. Otherwise prices will just be in the toilet for the foreseeable future.

The study was published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, which is owned by Elsevier, a data analytics company that specializes in scientific and medical data. It's a Netherlands-based company. They actually own a few major Journals like The Lancet and online science news outlets like ScienceDirect. I can't find much about it, but it seems to be an absolute shithead of a company in terms of being a cartel for academic data. Several US universities have stopped working with them because the schools were being screwed. This has played out in a lot of other countries too. Elsevier, they're not good, folks.

The editor of the JNB is a professor at the University of Kentucky. UoK has had some trouble recently in their cancer researchers. One was found to be manipulating data in order to secure funding for research. It wasn't the same professor that is the editor for this journal, I'm just saying the precedent for corrupt practices in that particular school is there.

Being American and knowing what I know about the history of US universities, there's likely a bit of business interest in research because that's just how our system operates. Businesses give money to universities to churn out workers, cheap/free R&D, and to rent them as think tanks. So it doesn't have to be a conspiracy, it's just business as usual.

I think the University of Kentucky lead is a dead end. But I found something kind of interesting. One of the researches credited in the paper is one Joshua D. Lambert. He works for Penn State University.

https://foodscience.psu.edu/directory/jdl134

He seems to do a lot of cool research such as using green tea and cocoa to prevent certain chronic health issues. I noticed that two of his research areas deals with cocoa. That seemed weird. Now it could be that he's familiar with cocoa and all its idiosyncrasies. Maybe he saw potential in another area and decided to use it on a different problem too. But then it dawned on me. Penn state is in Pennsylvania. Do you know what else is in Pennsylvania? Only the world's fifth largest candy company, Hersey.

There's literally a medical center named after the founder of Hersey.

https://www.pennstatehealth.org/locations/milton-s-hershey-medical-center

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_State_Milton_S._Hershey_Medical_Center

In 1963, the M. S. Hershey Foundation offered $50 million to the Pennsylvania State University to establish a medical school and teaching hospital in Hershey, Pennsylvania.[9] With this grant and $21.3 million from the U.S. Public Health Service, the university built a medical school, teaching hospital, and research center. Ground was broken in 1966 and Penn State's College of Medicine opened its doors to the first class of students in 1967. Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center accepted its first patients in 1970.[10][11]

Surely this is not a coincidence. Surely the chocolate bar maker didn't buy a university a medical research center that does studies on the benefits of cocoa in curing the ailments of obesity, a reason by which people stop eating chocolate candy. And certainly not at a time when candy consumption is down.

However, that has nothing to do with the supply of cocoa, not really. Hersey does not actually own any cocoa farms as far as I can tell. They just buy the stuff and they also speculate on cocoa as a commodity as well. Low prices are good for them because it allows them to buy cheap while selling their overpriced garbage and making more money. But candy consumption is obviously an issue and I can see them pushing research that says cocoa good. So the research isn't biased to help the supply of cocoa, just the consumption of candy.

So anyways I went down this rabbit hole because I think cocoa prices will go up again in the future. I don't think the nice weather will hold out in Ghana for very long. And I think that US companies pushing consumption will end up driving the supply down. I don't know when it'll start to go back up though. Don't invest in Hershey though because they're not producing the cocoa, just the candy.