“I expect to have clarity on cocoa prices, call it, in the next month or couple of months.”

In context

“wo elements that will come into play. One is cocoa prices. There has been some nervousness in the market as of late, but we believe that it is the result of the fact that the industry is still quite short and that the Ivory Coast has hardly sold any ‘24, ‘25 crop in the last month since they're waiting for the new crop to materialize. On the fundamentals of cocoa, the latest spot count is likely below the five year average in Ivory Coast, same in Ghana, but it is well up versus last year. And the level of confidence that we have at this point in time is round about 85%, but it will be soon in the next couple of weeks, three weeks, 90%. Importantly, the Ivory Coast port arrivals are up 25% already versus prior year and that's really points in the direction of good supply coming our way. So I expect to have clarity on cocoa prices, call it, in the next month or couple of months. I think the situation will be much, much clear -- much more clear. Importantly, what will drive cocoa prices is the arrival in Europe, which will be most likely in January, February and I think by then we should really have a sense of cocoa cost. That is important because in our case, we haven't locked in cocoa prices yet. We want to take advantage of the potential decline of cocoa costs, albeit we want also to be protected on the upper side of cost. On the other side, on the level of elasticity, look, I think you know that it takes a little bit of time to implement price in Europe. And I think we're going to see in places like the UK where we don't have buying alliances, we are going to see the effect of elasticities much earlier and quite honestly from what we see today, they are alread”