Cocoa Price History: Monthly Global Price in USD per Kilogram Since 1992

Cocoa is the core agricultural input behind the global chocolate industry, and its price is among the most geographically concentrated of any major commodity: the Ivory Coast and Ghana alone account for roughly 60% of world supply. This dataset reproduces the cocoa price of the World Bank Pink Sheet, the International Cocoa Organization daily price averaged by month, in US dollars per kilogram since January 1992. It is a clean reference for food-inflation analysis, soft-commodity research, and the study of weather- and disease-driven supply shocks.

Dataset: Cocoa Price (1992–2026) · Updated 2026-10-01

Data provided as is, with no warranty of accuracy or timeliness. Check any figure against the primary source cited on this page before using it. Terms: legal notice.

Source: World Bank, Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet) · CC BY 4.0

Macro Takeaway

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV and Excel files contain the following columns. Each row represents one calendar month.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats: monthly observations covering more than three decades.

Data provided as is, with no warranty of accuracy or timeliness. Check any figure against the primary source cited on this page before using it. Terms: legal notice.

Source Data Access: World Bank Pink Sheet

The underlying series is the “Cocoa” column of the Monthly Prices sheet in the World Bank’s Commodity Price Data, known as the Pink Sheet. The World Bank publishes it as a monthly Excel workbook on its commodity markets page, under a CC BY 4.0 licence that requires attribution to the World Bank.

The Eco3min dataset reproduces that column unmodified from January 1992, in US dollars per kilogram, in a stable CSV with a fixed column name for direct use in Python, R or any data pipeline. The URL never changes, which makes it suitable for automated scripts.

Direct CSV Access: Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/cocoa-price.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format. It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/cocoa-price.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

# Display first rows
print(df.head())

# Basic statistics
print(df["cocoa_price"].describe())

# Plot
df.plot(x="date", y="cocoa_price", title="Cocoa Price (USD/t)", legend=False)

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/cocoa-price.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

head(df)
summary(df$cocoa_price)

Both examples load the dataset directly from the URL, no download or API key required.

Methodology

The Pink Sheet column “Cocoa” is the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) daily price, the average of the first three positions on the terminal markets of New York and London (the nearest three future trading months), published by the World Bank in US dollars per kilogram. The series is therefore a composite reference rather than a single exchange quote.

Values are monthly averages, which smooth the intra-month swings visible in daily futures. The file begins in January 1992, although the World Bank series itself starts in 1960.

An Eco3min pipeline on GitHub Actions reads the Pink Sheet workbook after each monthly release, keeps the column unmodified and regenerates the CSV, Excel and JSON files and the page metadata. The World Bank updates the Pink Sheet on the second business day of each month.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Cocoa is one of the most actively traded soft commodities, and the ICCO daily price reproduced in the Pink Sheet is a widely cited market reference. A few provider-specific points matter when using this series.

• Release latency. The World Bank publishes the Pink Sheet on the second business day of each month, with the average of the month just ended. Eco3min refreshes the file after each release. The series is not a real-time price.
• Monthly average vs futures spot. This series is a monthly average of the ICCO daily price. It will differ from any single ICE futures settlement: the highest monthly average in the file, 10.75 USD/kg in January 2025, is by construction below the daily highs of the 2024–2025 rally.
• Revisions. Prices are market-derived and are not revised like survey-based macro series, but the World Bank can correct recent months or replace a series, and it lists those changes in the notes of the Pink Sheet workbook.
• Source change on 30 September 2026. Until that date this file reproduced another publisher’s series in US dollars per metric ton; it now reproduces the Pink Sheet column in US dollars per kilogram. Values downloaded before and after the switch are not comparable without conversion (1 US dollar per kilogram equals 1,000 US dollars per metric ton).
• Alternative sources. ICCO daily prices (icco.org), ICE cocoa futures (London and New York), and Trading Economics provide higher-frequency or contract-specific quotes. Note that US futures are sometimes quoted per ton and London futures in pounds sterling per ton.

Common Pitfalls When Using This Series

1. Confusing nominal and real prices. This series is nominal. Comparing a 1992 reading to a 2024 reading without adjusting for the cumulative food-price and general inflation of the period overstates the real change. Deflating by CPI gives the true purchasing-power move.
2. Reading the monthly average as a market price. Headlines quote ICE futures; this dataset reports the monthly average of the ICCO daily price. The two diverge most during fast-moving rallies, where the average lags the intraday extremes.
3. Treating recent extremes as a new baseline. A move from a multi-decade range into record territory, as in 2024, is unusual against the full distribution. Z-scores against a rolling window are more informative than absolute levels measured against recent memory.
4. Unit confusion. This series is in US dollars per kilogram. ICE cocoa futures are quoted per metric ton (US dollars in New York, pounds sterling in London), and files downloaded before 30 September 2026 were in US dollars per metric ton: 1 USD/kg equals 1,000 USD/t.

Historical Regimes

1992–2000: Post-liberalisation glut. Following the dismantling of the international cocoa buffer-stock and quota arrangements, abundant supply kept the monthly average below 1.80 USD/kg throughout, down to 0.86 in February 2000, the lowest in the file. Producing countries deregulated marketing boards under structural-adjustment programmes, weakening price support.

2001–2010: Ivorian instability and gradual recovery. Civil conflict in the Ivory Coast, the world’s largest producer, introduced a persistent risk premium. Prices climbed irregularly from 0.89 USD/kg in February 2001 to 3.53 in January 2010 as supply security became a recurring concern.

2011–2016: Elevated range. Strong grinding demand from emerging-market chocolate consumption met constrained West African output, holding prices in a higher band, roughly 2.30–3.20 USD/kg.

2017–2023: Underinvestment plateau. Prices settled into a lower range of roughly 2.00–2.50 USD/kg from 2017 to 2022 even as plantations aged and replanting lagged. That structural fragility surfaced in 2023, when the monthly average rose from 2.62 in January to 4.21 in December.

2024: Supply-shock supercycle. Swollen-shoot and black-pod disease, ageing trees, and adverse weather across the Ivory Coast and Ghana drove a multi-season deficit. The monthly average rose from 4.40 USD/kg in January 2024 to 9.74 in April, more than three times its April 2023 level and the largest 12-month rise in the file. It peaked at 10.75 in January 2025, a level never reached in the World Bank series, which starts in 1960.

2025–2026: Correction and surplus. Recovering West African output and a projected global surplus pulled the monthly average down about 70% to 3.24 USD/kg in March 2026, still above the 2017–2022 average of 2.31. It then rebounded to 5.95 in August 2026.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

Commodity Price Hub

This dataset is part of the Eco3min commodity price repository: energy, metals, agricultural softs and grains, most of them from the World Bank Pink Sheet.

Explore the Commodity Price Hub

Sources

• World Bank: Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), Monthly Prices, column “Cocoa” (CC BY 4.0)
• International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), daily cocoa price, the market basis of the Pink Sheet series

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). Cocoa Price: Global Monthly Price in USD per Kilogram (1992-2026). Source: World Bank, Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), CC BY 4.0.<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/cocoa-price-history-dataset/