Theft and smuggling in cocoa and chocolate

Follow the money - ram raiding, lorry jacking and systemic smuggling

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First, we saw a wave of gangs “ram-raiding” convenience stores for their shelves of chocolate confectionery – and the bizarre sight of chocolate bars being placed in plastic security boxes typically used for razor blades or pharmaceuticals (see Reuters report here).

Now we are hearing about a sophisticated scam by which 14 tonnes of limited-edition kitkats were “lorry jacked” on their way from Italy to Poland. That’s over 400,000 kitkats – so watch your market stall for any “too good to be true” deals.

Sadly neither trend is that novel. In particular, “logistics thefts” with fake pickups, stolen trailers, counterfeit orders etc. have plagued mass confectionery for the last decade. Here are some highlights (or rather lowlights)

The “real” Italian Job: In Italy in 2014, roughly 260 tonnes of Lindt chocolate were stolen from a transport hub near Lodi. Reuters reported that investigators later linked the theft to networks associated with an ’Ndrangheta / mafia investigation, and involved about 1.75 million Lindt bars
Kinder Surprise: In Neustadt, Germany, in 2017, thieves stole a refrigerated trailer carrying 20 tonnes of mixed sweets, including Nutella, Kinder Surprise eggs and other confectionery
Milkaing about: In Austria in 2019, a truck carrying 20 tonnes of chocolate (about 200,000 Milka bars valued at about €50,000) was stolen after a pickup from a Milka factory in Bludenz
Over egged: In Telford in 2023, a man stole almost 200,000 Creme Eggs, worth more than £31,000, from an industrial unit and hauled them away using a stolen lorry cab. Unlike many of the other cases listed, on this occasion the Police apprehended the thief as he was driving away on the M42 and Joby Pool was jailed for 18 months (and the eggs were safely recovered)
Taking an (unwelcome) break: In March 2026, a truck carrying about 12 tonnes of KitKats (i.e. over 400,000 limited edition KitKat bars) vanished while travelling from central Italy to Poland. Nestlé said both the vehicle and the bars were still missing, and asked customers to look out for “bargains” that could be tracked via their bar codes

The human story

The more important story however is what’s happening at origin, on the farms, ports and borders in Africa, South America and Asia. I’ve written several times about the impact of rising cocoa prices (see here and here), and more recently about how devastating the subsequent “grinding-down” of prices for cocoa farmers – especially in West Africa – has been (see here). There are real human costs from the way cocoa is (under) priced and controlled:

Armed guards: it’s now become commonplace for containers of dried beans to have armed trucks ahead of, and behind, convoys of lorries throughout South America and West Africa. See above for some pictures I took in Brazil two years ago. This puts our “lorry jackings” in a very different context.

The strain shows up further down the chain too. In Ghana, one of the most trusted and coveted jobs in cocoa communities is that of the Purchasing Clerk: the person responsible for paying farmers cash for their fermented and dried beans. It is a respected role, often held by formidable local women, but as cocoa prices soared it also became a dangerous one, with clerks exposed to the risk of robbery because they were suddenly handling far larger sums of money. And now, with prices having fallen back sharply and payment systems seizing up, the pressure has changed rather than disappeared: Reuters reported in March 2026 that some purchasing clerks were simply refusing to take more beans because buyers lacked the liquidity to pay farmers, leaving growers travelling from town to town in search of cash. Some were nervous to continue their work – but sadly as one local farmer and entrepreneur wryly observed “prices sadly didn’t stay high long enough for them to see any of this upside”.

But arguably the biggest challenge – certainly in volume terms – remains smuggling. The bulk of world cocoa comes from West Africa, and especially Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana. In both these countries, farmgate prices are “set” to provide a floor (and source of government revenue). However, this means that when prices surge (as they did last year), smuggling becomes a MAJOR issue – to cite a few examples from Reuters from the Ivory Coast that are the tip of an epidemic:

February 2025: customs seized about 2,000 metric tons of cocoa beans at Abidjan port, worth roughly $19 million, after they were allegedly falsely declared as rubber to avoid the much higher cocoa tax.
October 2024: authorities seized 33 trucks carrying around 1,100 tonnes of smuggled cocoa beans across the Guinea border.
February 2024: the Coffee and Cocoa Council said police seized three trucks loaded with 1,500 bags of cocoa beans on the Guinea border.

To put these cases in a wider context, Reuters reported that exporters and buyers estimated 50,000 to 75,000 metric tons of Ivorian cocoa had been trafficked across the border into Guinea and Liberia at the start of the 2024/25 season. In a separate September 2024 report, Reuters said Ghana lost around 160,000 tonnes of cocoa to smuggling, with COCOBOD explicitly linking the losses to traffickers offering higher prices in countries such as Togo and Côte d’Ivoire. Reuters also noted the scale and organisation of the trade, saying smugglers were using fuel tankers, oil drums, and tipper trucks to move beans illicitly. Industry insiders suggest that even these figures are understating the scale of the problem.

To put this into context:

Source: BRCs, Reuters.

For the UK in 2025, a reasonable working estimate is that food shoplifting amounted to roughly 55,000–80,000 tonnes, while food stolen in cargo thefts was probably around 9,000–17,000 tonnes. Those are not official tonnage counts: they are reconstructed estimates based on the British Retail Consortium’s finding of 5.5 million detected shoplifting incidents costing nearly £400 million in the year to August 2025, the UK grocery market’s scale at £195.3 billion, and UK freight-crime losses of £111.5 million in 2024, combined with cargo-theft evidence showing food and beverage as one of the most-targeted categories.

Set against that, Ghana alone lost 160,000 tonnes of cocoa to smuggling in 2023/24, according to a Cocobod official quoted by Reuters. So even allowing for uncertainty in the UK estimates and calculations, Britain looks to be losing about 0.1-0.5% of food retail sales to theft via shoplifting and lorry jacking. By contrast Ghana lost up to a THIRD of its cocoa crop to smuggling.

A plea for transparency and longer term stable, and higher, prices

Smuggling is now an endemic problem. And it’s really not fair to “blame” farmers for seeking higher prices – for decades they were already struggling to get buy on less that $1 a day, and were both seeing their yields falling and higher “illicit” prices. The recent spikes, and even more recent collapse of cocoa commodity prices, have made an already fraught situation in the massive world of commodity chocolate far, far worse.

Craft chocolate seeks to avoid these challenges of gyrating, opaque and unfair prices through transparency and long term contracts that pay 2-8x farmgate prices. So if you are celebrating your Easter with a craft chocolate Egg, Bunny, Sheep or bar thank you – and take a quick moment to look at where the beans have come from. The farmers and makers thank you – as do we.

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