Faced with multiple challenges, Canadian craft chocolate makers are fighting the good fight | Canada Voices

When chocolate maker Taylor Kennedy tries to explain the gulf between the premium cocoa beans he sources and the ones used in mass-market candy bars, he leans on the tomato metaphor.

There is the tomato you get at the farmers’ market in August – vibrant, fragrant and the perfect marriage of tart, sweet and umami. And then there’s the one you find in the supermarket in January – pale, mealy and tasteless. They’re leagues apart.

Is it chocolate? Your chances of finding the real thing are shrinking

In the past few years when the cost of cocoa spiked – largely owing to climate change and fungal disease – the world’s chocolate giants responded by shrinking their bars, raising their prices and subbing in oil for cocoa butter.

Meanwhile, Kennedy, the owner of Sirene Chocolate in Victoria, kept the price of his 70-gram bars – most of which sell for $10 – the same. While he was paying about 30 per cent more for premium cocoa in 2025 than a few years earlier, it was a less shocking increase than the one big players had to swallow of more than 300 per cent.

In many ways, Canada’s craft chocolate makers have had an easier time of the recent industry instability than their big-business counterparts. Because of their much smaller size and use of premium beans, makers like Kennedy have been able to respond more nimbly to supply issues while increased costs have been easier to manage. And the ethos of the craft chocolate movement means they’ve had no choice but to maintain high quality.

“Especially the past few years, with shrinkflation and ingredients changing and everything else, the big companies have doubled down on exactly what I was rebelling against,” Kennedy said.

An Oh Henry bar, for example, contains a range of sugars, oils and emulsifiers, as well as peanuts and chocolate. The amount of chocolate in the ultrasweet coating is so negligible that the bar, made by Hershey, must describe it as “chocolatey” by Canadian labelling standards.

Compare that with the award-winning Ch’abil, Sirene’s 65-per-cent dark milk chocolate bar made from cacao and cardamom sourced from Guatemala. A tiny square starts off fruity and mildly bitter on the tongue, and as it slowly melts it turns floral and just sweet enough. It’s made with organic cocoa beans, organic cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, whole milk and cardamom.

Mary Luz Mejia, a Canadian expert in craft chocolate who has judged competitions and conducts chocolate tastings, says craft makers have had to be careful in how they respond to a volatile cocoa market, since transparency and traceability are so important in the bean-to-bar world (in which small batches of chocolate are made from scratch by the same producer).

“That’s one of their tenets, right? They’re differentiating themselves from the Nestlé, Mars and Cadburys of the world by offering these things,” she says.

Cocoa, like coffee, typically has a long supply chain, which is frequently rife with labour exploitation. Farmers often make very little money since the cocoa often goes from them to transporters, processors, manufacturers and retailers, each of them taking a cut. Many bean-to-bar makers pride themselves on the direct trade relationships they have with farmers, which eliminates several middlemen.

The industry turmoil actually prompted Kennedy to strengthen his relationships with the farmers he sources beans from in cocoa-producing countries such as Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru. But the shortage of cocoa a few years ago was so severe, several chocolate makers in Canada struggled to access it unless they were able to purchase large volumes.

Mejia has noticed that rather than reformulating their chocolate with more sugar or with oils, craft makers have pivoted to bars with inclusions, such as caramel, sponge toffee, nuts and dried fruit. They kept their chocolate recipes the same, just used less of it.

One of the most popular bars Toronto’s Soul Chocolate sells is a milk chocolate made with candied hazelnuts, which are grown in Ontario by the Nutty Neighbours.

When Soul Chocolate launched in 2017, they offered a limited selection of single-origin bean-to-bar dark chocolate. They’ve since expanded their line, a creative solution to supply challenges.

When they had trouble sourcing beans from some countries, they took some of their single-origin bars temporarily out of rotation. With the beans they could get, they started making multiple bars, experimenting with flavouring and mix-ins and selling milk chocolate and white chocolate for the first time.

Though Soul’s product line is ever-changing, their 25-gram bars have stayed the same price they’ve always been – $5.50, including tax. Profits-wise, 2025 was a tough year (“closer to break even,” owner Kyle Wilson says), but the price hike also prompted Wilson to rethink how he sources cocoa.

When prices were soaring, an exporter he worked with in Colombia offered him 12 tonnes of beans for purchase at a decent price – on the condition he took the full volume. Prior to that, Wilson only ever bought a few tonnes at a time, but he bit the bullet and agreed to the large order. Prices continued to rise but the beans he bought carried him through most of the year. He’s more strategic now about purchasing and making long-term plans for his business.

“We have some breathing room where we’re not just at the mercy of a market,” he said.

Though cocoa prices have come down significantly from their peak in January, 2025, most grocery store chocolate has gone up significantly in cost. This has actually narrowed the retail price gap between bigger players and the small bean-to-bar makers, Kennedy points out. With premium dark chocolate stocked in national grocery chains now selling for $7 to $9, Sirene’s $10 bars don’t seem as spendy by comparison.

At Montreal’s État de Choc, prices have increased – 50-gram bars that were $11 a few years ago now sell for $15 to $16 – but the declining quality of mass-market chocolate has helped owner Maud Gaudreau justify that price increase.

Her shop carries bean-to-bar chocolate from makers around the world, but she also sells her own line of products, which include a 70-per-cent dark chocolate egg filled with freeze-dried banana cream and hazelnuts, and an award-winning bar studded with passion-fruit-infused cocoa nibs.

Gaudreau, a chocolatier, doesn’t make the raw chocolate herself – she buys it from a chocolate maker and uses it as an ingredient. In 2018 she was paying $35 to $50 a kilo for it, but now the range is $52 to $80 a kilo. When customers ask her about that, she tells them: “All these chocolates are made with the top 1 per cent best beans in the world compared to the commercial chocolate.”

“If they don’t want to pay, well, we won’t sell it, or I will do something else,” she said. Trying to source cheaper chocolate made from inferior beans wasn’t an option. “I didn’t want to compromise the quality.”