The world is facing a chocolate shortage due to climate change, supply chain issues, and rising production costs. Bill Yoder with Dutch Valley Food Distributors says this has been an issue for a few years.

“The main reason behind the shortage is cocoa beans, the weather has impacted it. Also, the yield they're getting out of the crops isn't what they want, “said Yoder.

Nicole and Isaac Bucher, owners of Mister Ed’s Elephant Museum and Candy Emporium had to get creative to combat the shortage. They also began utilized compound chocolate.

“I would say, chocolate -covered Peeps is a good example of that. Peeps, marshmallow covered in lots of sugar. We, as an industry, lots of retailers would dip that in real chocolate and put sprinkles on it then. Is it worth covering that in real chocolate, or is maybe that something we should transition to a compound chocolate? Compound chocolate is just replacing the fat in the chocolate, which would be cocoa butter with a vegetable oil or substitute, and it's a lot more affordable, “said Nicole Bucher.

Yoder says the shortage has impacted operations at Dutch Valley Food Distributors by creating more manual work.

“We actually are allocating orders for our customers based off of volume from the past years. To explain it best, if a customer comes into us and wants to pull 10 ,000 pounds of chocolate, what they didn't buy from us last year, we're most likely going to turn that customer away, because we need that inventory to supply our current customers. Same goes for if a customer ordered 5 ,000 pounds last year in Q1, and now they want 15 ,000 pounds, we're going to hold them to that 5 ,000 pounds. We might be a little flexible, maybe an extra thousand or two to help them, but we really have to manage our inventory closely and keep it tight to make sure that we can supply all of our existing customers, “said Yoder.

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