There are a lot of issues working against the snack world right now from tariffs to cocoa and sugar prices, to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) ban on dyes and artificial colors. Let’s take a look. First, there is the ongoing volatility of cocoa prices. Prices have been in an almost constant state of flux for all of 2025, remaining significantly ahead of their roughly $2,500/MT levels during 2022. However, prices last month dropped off considerably. After settling at just over $10,000/MT in mid-May, cocoa futures in New York dropped nearly 25 percent in less than a month. The price of $7,309/MT on 16 June is effectively the lowest price of the year and off 21.3 percent since “Tariff Liberation Day” on 2 April. T...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.