Mars and Cadbury push Easter egg prices up 38% as cocoa collapses back to pre-crisis levels
Chocolate manufacturers blame commodity costs for shrinking products and rising prices, but the numbers tell a different story
A bag of Cadbury Mini Eggs now costs £36 per kilogram. Tesco Finest sirloin steak costs £27. Somehow, in the space of two years, a product that is three-quarters sugar, milk powder and vegetable fat has come to command a higher price by weight than premium beef. The manufacturers responsible would like you to believe this was unavoidable.
It was not.
Every major chocolate brand has simultaneously shrunk its Easter eggs and raised their prices this year, compounding the two effects into increases that would be startling in any consumer category. The Maltesers extra-large egg lost an entire pack of Maltesers from its box, dropping from 231g to 194g, while the recommended price climbed from £6 to £7. That combination produces a 38% increase in price by weight in a single year. The Maltesers Teasers large egg shrank 18% and rose 12.5% at the till, producing an identical 38% jump per gram. Cadbury's extra-large Twirl egg swapped two full-size bars for two individual fingers. Its per-weight cost rose 29%. Even the Cadbury Mini Eggs family bag shed four eggs, a reduction subtle enough to escape notice at the shelf but plain enough on the scales.
Which?, tracking some 25,000 supermarket products, found that chocolate inflation hit 9.7% in January while broader food inflation fell to 3.6%. A Galaxy extra-large egg at Asda posted the worst figure: 44% dearer per gram than the same product twelve months earlier.
The incredible shrinking egg
Shrinkflation has been the confectionery industry's preferred tool for more than a decade. Raise the price openly and consumers rebel. Reformulate with cheaper ingredients and the product tastes wrong. But trim the contents by ten or fifteen per cent, keep the box the same size, and most people never notice. A tin of Quality Street weighed 1.3kg in 2010. By 2016 it was 820g. By 2025, 600g. The tin kept shrinking. The price never followed it down.
What distinguishes 2026 is that manufacturers have stopped choosing between strategies and started using all of them at once. Products are smaller, more expensive, and increasingly padded with non-chocolate fillers. Since Mondelez acquired Cadbury, Oreo cookies, Biscoff biscuits and jelly sweets have steadily colonised what were once chocolate products. These additions arrive dressed as flavour innovations. Their commercial logic is simpler: sugar costs a fraction of cocoa, and every gram of biscuit in the box is a gram of chocolate that did not need to be bought.
Consumers have noticed. Capgemini's annual research, polling 12,000 shoppers across twelve countries, found that 61% of British consumers now consider shrinkflation "very unfair". Nearly two-thirds said they would rather see a modest price increase than discover a smaller product when they got home. And 64% said they would welcome retailers flagging when a brand had cut its pack size. Julian Burnett, Capgemini's UK head of retail, put it plainly: consumers grasp that costs rise, but unsignalled shrinkage feels like deception, and deception corrodes trust.
That lost trust has consequences. Retail analysts writing in The Grocer have described Easter eggs as an "elastic category", and predicted that sales will fall as a direct result of such steep increases. Shoppers who feel cheated do not complain. They switch to own-brand, or they walk past the seasonal aisle entirely.
A convenient excuse
Ask the manufacturers why and you receive near-identical statements about cocoa. Mars Wrigley told journalists that "ongoing pressures, including the well-documented rises in the cost of cocoa" had forced "carefully considered changes". Nestlé said it had taken "every possible step to minimise the impact of high cocoa prices". Both added the same caveat: final pricing remains at the discretion of individual retailers.
The retailers, when asked, pointed back at the brands. Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, acknowledged that for branded goods, changes to size and price are "largely determined by the brands themselves". So Mars says the retailer sets the price. The BRC says Mars sets the price. The consumer, caught in this loop, pays it.
Cocoa did spike. For years the commodity bumbled along at $2,000 to $3,000 per tonne. Then poor harvests in West Africa, compounded by disease and decades of deforestation, sent prices climbing from mid-2023. By spring 2024 they had cleared $12,000 per tonne, more than four times the historical norm. Financial speculators piled in, widening the gap between the commodity price and what cocoa beans were actually worth to processors. This was a genuine crisis for anyone who buys chocolate in bulk, and no honest account of the situation can ignore it.
But that crisis ended. By February 2026, cocoa had fallen to around $3,500 per tonne according to IMF data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, touching $2,846 at its lowest point, a price not seen since October 2023. The FT's commodities index had cocoa down 57% year on year. StoneX projected a global surplus of 287,000 tonnes for the 2025/26 crop year. Ghana's Cocoa Board disclosed that 50,000 tonnes of beans sat unsold at the country's ports because international buyers were walking away from the asking price. The cocoa market had not merely stabilised. It had swung into glut.
One concession is fair. Easter egg ranges are planned roughly nine months ahead. Companies locking in their 2026 ranges in mid-2025 were looking at a market that analysts expected to settle around $6,000 to $7,000 per tonne. The actual collapse ran well past those forecasts.
That excuse has a twelve-month shelf life. If Easter 2027 brings the same prices and the same diminished product sizes, it will have expired.
Rockets and feathers
Energy economists have a term for the pattern now playing out in the chocolate aisle. In 1991, Robert Bacon studied UK petrol stations and observed that pump prices surged within days of an increase in crude oil costs but drifted down over weeks and months when crude fell. He called it "rockets and feathers". Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago later examined 242 markets, producer and consumer goods alike, and found that prices rose faster than they fell in two out of three of them. Mariano Tappata formalised the mechanism in a 2009 paper for the RAND Journal of Economics, showing that the asymmetry emerges naturally whenever consumers are only partially aware of input costs. No collusion required. No conspiracy necessary. Just the ordinary incentives of firms that face watchful buyers on the way up and inattentive ones on the way down.
The logic is intuitive. Rising costs force rapid pass-through because margins compress. Falling costs invite delay because consumers who have already absorbed a higher price stop shopping around. Tappata demonstrated that people search harder when prices climb than when they recede, which gives firms less room to lag on increases but wide latitude to lag on reductions. The pattern has been documented in petrol, electricity, banking, and meat markets. Chocolate, sold by a handful of dominant firms to millions of partially attentive shoppers, fits the model cleanly.
Jennifer Earl, a chocolate industry writer and commentator, offered a comparison that puts the manufacturers' claims under particular strain. Craft bean-to-bar chocolate makers, she noted, work with bars that are 70% cocoa or more, and their prices rose between 10 and 20% through the crisis. Some have since lowered them as commodity costs eased. One shop she visited had chosen to cut prices voluntarily because the market now allowed it. Mass-market eggs, by contrast, contain chocolate with cocoa solids of 23 to 25%. The coating on a Maltesers egg is thin, and beneath it is malt, sugar and wheat. Cocoa is a minority ingredient. A 38% increase in the per-gram cost of a product whose cocoa content is a fraction of its weight cannot credibly be pinned on cocoa alone, however volatile the commodity has been.
Following the money
Mars Wrigley UK's accounts, filed at Companies House, tell their own story. Turnover grew from £1.18bn in 2021 to £1.55bn in 2024, which might be expected in an inflationary environment. The profit line is more revealing. Pre-tax profit stood at £146m in 2021, dipped to £117m in 2022, then nearly doubled to £245m in 2023 before easing to £227m in 2024. Profit margins moved accordingly: 12.4%, 9.5%, 17.1%, 14.6%. Fortune reported that Mars UK paid its shareholders a £600m dividend off the back of its 2023 results, more than five times the prior year's payout.
These are not the accounts of a company being squeezed. They describe a business that has converted a commodity shock into a margin opportunity.
Mondelez, which owns Cadbury, shows a more mixed picture in the UK, where pre-tax profits fell from £88m to £61m in 2024 even as turnover grew 9.6% to £2.42bn. But the global parent told a different story: operating profits up 21% in the third quarter of 2024, driven by price increases of 5.1 percentage points on barely any volume growth. The global strategy is legible enough. Push prices up, absorb the modest volume losses, and collect the wider margin on everything that still sells.
Roughly four or five companies buy most of the world's cocoa and process it into chocolate. A similar number own the brands consumers recognise. Earl made the point succinctly: because these firms are almost all shareholder-owned, the pressure runs one way. Costs rise and get passed through. Costs fall and the savings stick to the balance sheet. The concentrated structure of the industry means no single company faces enough competitive pressure to break ranks and lower prices first.
The transparency gap
Across the Channel, France tried something different. In September 2023, Carrefour began placing bright orange labels on products it judged to have been subject to shrinkflation. The wording was blunt: "This product has seen its volume or weight fall and the effective price by the supplier rise." The retailer named the manufacturers responsible and used the labels as leverage in price negotiations.
The French government formalised the approach in July 2024, requiring all retailers with more than 400 square metres of floor space to display notices when a pre-packaged product has shrunk while its price has held or risen. Fines run up to €15,000 per offence. Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister, was characteristically direct, calling shrinkflation a rip-off.
Compliance has been uneven. The consumer group UFC-Que Choisir found that only three retail chains were consistently displaying the required notices within the first ten days. Information was often incomplete. The group observed, with some tartness, that retailers who communicate promotional discounts with great flair seem to lose that ability when the news is unflattering. France, Hungary, Romania and Italy have all now adopted or proposed shrinkflation transparency rules, though the European Commission opened infringement proceedings against Italy's version in March 2025, leaving the regulatory picture unsettled across the continent.
Britain has no equivalent measure. Despite 64% of consumers telling researchers they would welcome it, no proposal exists. Shoppers who want to know whether they are getting less for more must squint at the unit-price labels on the shelf edge and do the arithmetic themselves, a task that the weekly shop rarely accommodates and that manufacturers have no incentive to simplify.
The twelve-month test
The manufacturers' lead-time argument explains this year's prices. Cocoa was expensive when these ranges were designed, contracts were locked in at elevated rates, and the commodity fell faster than anyone predicted. Grant them that.
What it does not explain is the profit data showing healthy or expanding margins throughout the supposed crisis. Or the arithmetic of attributing a 38% price increase to cost movements in a minority ingredient. Or the contrast with craft producers, who work with far more cocoa and absorbed the shock with far smaller increases. Or the structural concentration that insulates these firms from competitive pressure. Or the decades of evidence, across markets and countries, that consumer prices rocket up with input costs and float down like feathers when those costs recede.
Cocoa is trading near its pre-crisis level. Harvests are recovering. Analysts project global surpluses stretching into the next crop year. If next Easter's Maltesers egg is still 194 grams and still costs £7, the commodity defence will be gone. What remains will look a great deal like opportunistic margin protection dressed up as force majeure.
The French would put a sticker on it.