Spaniards are facing an increase in food prices just before Christmas. This was warned by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) yesterday, which raised the food CPI by four tenths in the last month, placing it at an annual rate of 2.8%. This increase adds to the 34% rise that the cost of the shopping basket has been experiencing since before the pandemic.
But the impact will be particularly noticeable in the typical sweets of this season such as nougat, marzipan, and chocolate bonbons, the main protagonists of Christmas. The reason lies in two key ingredients whose prices have skyrocketed in the last year: cocoa and almonds, present in most traditional desserts.
In the case of cocoa, the price escalation is neither new nor temporary. Between 2023 and 2025, its price at the source has experienced an unprecedented increase, driven mainly by the drastic drop in production in Ivory Coast and Ghana - countries that account for nearly 60% of the world's cocoa - as a direct consequence of climate change. Prolonged droughts, diseases in plantations, pests, and a shortage of fertilizers have plummeted productivity. This is compounded by the depletion of international stocks and a sustained increase in demand, especially in emerging markets like Asia, all within a context of global inflation that raises production costs.
The result has been a perfect storm that led cocoa to exceed $12,000 per ton in 2024 and globally multiplied the value of pure cocoa, from ¤2,400 per ton in 2022 to around ¤7,000 today, an increase of about 180%. The impact is already being felt in Spain, chocolate is now 12.4% more expensive than a year ago, according to the latest data from the INE.
All this tension has driven up the cost of products made with cocoa, from chocolate bonbons to chocolate nougat, significantly increasing their final price on supermarket shelves.
In contrast, the price of almonds began to rise a bit later but did so steadily from September 2024, coinciding with the start of the season. Its price has surged strongly: from ¤90-95 per 100 kilos of unshelled almonds recorded between January and August 2024 to around ¤120 in 2025, with peaks of ¤138 in June, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture. Markets report increases of between 15% and 25% in varieties such as Marcona, Largueta, and Comuna, with no clearly justifiable structural reasons, beyond high demand and possible speculative factors, as warned by the OCU.
Almonds are the base of most traditional nougat and marzipan, so their price increase directly impacts the final price. This is compounded by other rising inputs, such as eggs, whose cost has increased significantly this year due to outbreaks of avian flu that have reduced production.
According to data from the Spanish Association of Sweets (Produlce), the consumption of nougat and marzipan during this Christmas period represents approximately 80% of the sector's annual turnover, with ¤290 million recorded in 2024. And this season comes marked by unprecedented prices.
The combination of all these factors has caused the price of nougat to soar by 16% in the last year, according to a study by the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU), and that of chocolate to increase by 51% compared to 2022, according to a price analysis conducted by this newspaper. This escalation is clearly reflected in branded nougat, which has practically become a luxury item: today, a kilo of chocolate nougat from a chocolate manufacturer costs around ¤21 in the main supermarkets in our country, when just three years ago it was around ¤14 per kilo.
And even though sugar, one of the basic ingredients, has become cheaper in the last year, its impact on the final price is limited when compared to the weight of raw materials such as almonds or eggs, both of which have significantly increased in price. Nevertheless, even sugar-free nougat has seen an average increase of 13.6%, as indicated by the OCU.
The price hike not only affects nougat and marzipan. Sweets that include hazelnuts - like many chocolates - will also see their prices rise this Christmas, after this nut has increased by 6.8%, following the same upward trend as almonds.