As many look to stock up on Easter chocolate, it comes as the major challenges facing many smaller Greater Toronto Area chocolate businesses for the past several months are beginning to ease.

At Stubbe Chocolates Toronto, just before Good Friday and the Easter weekend, owner Daniel Stubbe and his staff rushed to fill the shelves with their signature chocolate products like German truffles, bonbons, whimsical Easter bunnies and elaborate eggs.

“We have families who’ve come here for years, sometimes even decades, or where kids got Easter bunnies from us when they were little, and now they bring their own kids in and buy them the same bunnies,” he said.

Since 2024, Stubbe said he has faced a big hit to his bottom line after cocoa futures went above US$12,000 a tonne — four times higher than the year before.

“A lot of my colleagues, and including us, we try to kind of absorb some of the cost because a four times the price increase is just not feasible,” he told CityNews.

“We were really on a roller coaster. It hit us.”

Sandra Abballe-Domanico, the owner of Vaughan-based Succulent Chocolates and Sweets — known for hand-painted bonbons and other specialty items, said she’s also encountered major price hikes from her suppliers. Earlier in 2026, she said she paid nearly $27 a kilogram for dark chocolate — up from around $9 in 2020.

“It has been a significant challenge, absolutely, because it hasn’t just been cacao and chocolate that has increased. It has been everything that goes into chocolate, especially the cream, the butter, the raw materials and even the packaging has increased,” Abballe-Domanico told CityNews.

Compounding the issues facing chocolate companies, Abballe-Domanico and Stubbe said they’ve started to see changing customer patterns amid current economic challenges.

“Affordability in Canada right now is not great. We know that they’re increasing prices at the grocery store, so they’re a little bit more hesitant to spend a larger amount on a luxury item,” Abballe-Domanico said, outlining a shift to smaller product quantities.

“Rather than (a box of) 24 (chocolates), they go for a box of 18 or a box of 12. We haven’t seen consumers really like not buying chocolate at all, and, in the case of our business, we are luxury, but we are an affordable luxury,” Stubbe said.

David Johnston, a professor with York University’s Schulich School of Business and the director of the George Weston Ltd. Centre for Sustainable Supply Chains, said the supply chain of raw chocolate ingredients has been affected by climate change and environmental issues like crop disease in abundant parts of Africa.

The price spike in 2024 also affected commercial chocolate companies eager to lock up supplies, leading to increased prices for consumers. Experts said large-scale companies ink deals to buy ingredients up to 18 months ahead of time. They said those locked-in costs have been more noticeable in recent months through price increases or product reformulations.

“Because it’s such an important part of their product that determines its final price and their profitability, they try to tie up those supplies as early as possible, and they try to hedge against the possibility that there might be a disruption in supply,” Johnston said.

“The reason why you’re having crop failures in places where they’re growing cacao beans is because [there are] changes in volatility in the climate: too dry, too wet, and that encourages disease.”

However, international farmers saw better-than-expected yields thanks to improving weather conditions after the environmental issues experienced in 2024.

Kyle Wilson, the co-owner of Soul Chocolate, an east-end Toronto business that makes chocolate products from scratch using premium raw ingredients sourced from South America and Africa, said he has developed shorter lead-time cycles with his suppliers.

He said that gives smaller businesses like his a bit of an advantage in adapting pricing and practices more quickly.

“We’ve been making chocolate for 10 years, so I think we’ve kind of passed that really critical point of success or failure, but … every year presents its own challenges,” Wilson said.

“Our pricing has actually dropped a little bit because the market, the commodity market, at this moment actually went from $12,000 a tonne back down to $3,000 a tonne, so it’s gone back down to where it’s kind of been sitting for years to our advantage.”

Johnston said the situation in Iran, along with wider geopolitical and environmental issues, reinforces the need for bolstering supply chains.

“We have to be mindful about where we source those materials and how stable they are, and what we can do as a nation and as an economy to stabilize those sources because it’s in our self-interest.”

Meanwhile, with new concerns about how spikes in fuel prices will affect goods, all three business owners CityNews spoke with had a shared message to customers in the Greater Toronto Area: support is needed as much as ever.

“Small chocolatiers have been riding this wave and, quite frankly, struggling for the past few years on how to be able to continue to bring good quality chocolate into the community, and without our local shoppers, we wouldn’t be able to do that. So thank you to the people for shopping local,” Abballe-Domanico said.

“You get better product from your local butcher than what you get at the grocery store, and chocolate is no different, Stubbe said.

“Anything in the food industry right now, I think, is having a bit more of a challenging time, so if you can focus a little more locally I think that’s the best,” Wilson added.

With files from The Canadian Press