Cocoa Prices Crashed About 55%. Strauss's Profit Jumped 113%. We Checked What the Same Elite Chocolate Bar Costs at Every Chain

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-08-18 · 4 min read

113% — Strauss's Q2 2026 net-profit jump, driven mainly by a ~25% drop in raw coffee costs and a ~55% crash in raw cocoa costs (per TheMarker, Aug 12 2026) — while in Superclear's own scan (Aug 18, 2026) the identical 100g Elite milk chocolate bar still ranges from ₪4.90 to ₪14.90 across chains, and costs 81% more on average at Israel's priciest chain than at its cheapest

In the second-quarter 2026 report Strauss published this week, one number is hard to argue with: net profit of about NIS 195 million, a 113% jump from the same quarter last year. The main driver, according to the report itself and the coverage of it, isn't some marketing win — it's a collapse in the price of the raw materials behind almost everything Elite makes: coffee and cocoa. The more interesting question is what happened, in that exact same period, to the price you pay on the shelf.

Cocoa crashed, coffee got cheaper

Per TheMarker, raw coffee prices fell about 25% since the start of the year, and raw cocoa — the core ingredient in every Elite chocolate bar — crashed about 55% from its peak. World commodity data backs the direction: per Trading Economics, cocoa futures traded at $6,069 per tonne as of August 17, 2026 — down about 24.6% from a year earlier, after peaking near $12,906 a tonne in December 2024. In other words: the period when soaring cocoa prices justified, at least in part, the 2024-2025 wave of chocolate price hikes is over. The trend has reversed.

The report that confirms it, in numbers

Strauss's quarterly results tell exactly this story from the other side. Per Bizportal and ICE, group sales fell 6.7% to NIS 2.867 billion for the quarter — but operating profit actually jumped 41.9%, to NIS 363 million, and operating margin climbed from 8.3% to 12.6% of sales. The sales decline itself is attributed mainly to a stronger shekel hurting revenue from the group's international operations, not to weaker local demand for coffee and chocolate. In plain terms: Strauss sold less in shekel terms, but earned far more on every unit it did sell — exactly what you'd expect when your core raw material gets tens of percent cheaper.

The raw price fell, the consumer price rose more

The open question is where that windfall went. Per a separate TheMarker piece published a day after the earnings report, Strauss itself acknowledges it previously raised its coffee and chocolate prices by up to 30% — less, it says, than the peak surge in commodity prices. But the article points directly at the asymmetry: the sharp drop in raw material costs wasn't passed back to consumers at anywhere near the same pace, letting the company capture exceptional margins on instant coffee, cocoa powder, chocolate bars and dairy chocolate treats. It's the same pattern we've already documented on coffee: when the input rises, the hike reaches the shelf almost immediately; when it falls, the relief gets stuck on the way.

What our data shows

This is where Superclear's own numbers come in. We checked the barcodes of Elite's two flagship chocolate bars — the 100g milk chocolate bar (7290000170053) and the 100g 60% dark chocolate bar (7290100854266) — in our scan from August 18, 2026.

The milk chocolate bar, the more popular of the two, is sold in 1,740 stores across 33 chains, at prices ranging from ₪4.90 to ₪14.90 — a 204% gap on the exact same bar. At the chain level, Osher Ad is cheapest on average (₪8.22), while Yellow is priciest (₪14.87 on average) — a gap of about 81% between the cheapest and priciest chain. That's no coincidence: Osher Ad is also the cheapest chain in Israel on Superclear's overall priciness index, and Yellow ranks as the single most expensive chain, at 31% above the national median. The gap on this one chocolate bar simply mirrors, in a single product, the same ranking our overall basket index shows across the whole shopping cart.

The dark chocolate bar tells a similar story: it's sold in 242 stores, at prices ranging from ₪6.90 to ₪17.90 — a 159% gap. Here too, Tiv Taam (₪16.00 on average) is meaningfully pricier than Rami Levy and Osher Ad (around ₪11.30-₪11.60 on average).

The bottom line

Strauss hasn't done anything illegal here — it reported its results with full transparency, as a public company is required to. But the report itself is the sharpest evidence yet for a claim we've already made about coffee: when the price of a raw material rises, the hike reaches the shelf almost immediately; when it falls by tens of percent, the profit stays with the manufacturer. If you're buying an Elite chocolate bar soon, our data points to one clear takeaway: between ₪4.90 and ₪14.90 on the exact same bar, the more useful question isn't "when will the price drop" — it's "which chain am I standing in."

Sources