”I would rather wake up in 2011, but, unfortunately, every morning I find it’s still 2009,” says Jihad Jabra, general manager of chocolate producer Supreme Chocolat. The decline in chocolate sales over the last few months has not been anticipated by chocolate producers, which did not think any segment of the food industry would be significantly affected by the current situation. Whilst in the first part of last year, chocolate producers were complaining about the high costs of raw materials and hoping things would improve, allowing them to invest more in production, the last few months of 2008 proved to them that things could be much worse.
”We don’t have all the figures yet, but we have felt a decline in orders from retailers,” says Jabra, for whom the clearest signal was the low demand for chocolate in November, otherwise a month boasting the highest sales. In 2008, however, people tended to put off their holiday chocolate shopping until December, and they didn’t even buy as much as in previous years. ”I think this change came about amid negative information which emerged in October,” says Erwin Vondenhoff, general manager of Heidi Chocolats Suisse. 2008 had started well for everybody, with satisfactory sales and economic growth, the only complaint voiced by producers being related to personnel shortage.
”However, starting in October, we felt a blockage, growth slowed down, with sales lower than the forceful start would have had us expect. It was apparent that consumers moved quickly from emotionally-driven to functionallydriven purchases,” says Jabra. Producers will not be able to offer cautious consumers more attractive prices, quite the contrary: They have accepted that, like most producers in the food industry, they will be forced to increase prices, amid an increase in the cost of raw materials and amid exchange rate fluctuation (which will mainly affect importers, generating a gap between Romanian-produced chocolate, one of whose advantages is that its labour costs are in RON, and imported chocolate).
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