Before you settle in to reach this article about saving dessert from climate change, please make Caroline Saunders’ recipe for Extra Dark Brownies with Coffee Mascarpone Frosting.
When frost settles on the windowpanes, I start leaving a container of cocoa powder, a bag of coffee, and a bottle of vanilla extract on the counter for quicker enlistment in cookie- and cake-making. These flavors are the primary colors of my winter baking.
They’re also at greater risk from climate change than many people realize. Cocoa, coffee, and vanilla have each become more expensive in recent years because of extreme weather. Equally alarmingly, some of their flavors are dipping toward mediocrity. We risk a slow erosion of the joy of dessert.
Save Dessert!
In Brazil, the world’s top coffee producer, the coffee industry faced its second consecutive year of drought in 2024. By last August, the sprawling rows of coffee trees at many farms weren’t the vivid green they should have been. Instead, they were brown and crisp with a few dead leaves clinging to tangles of desiccated branches. The drought was the country’s worst on record and was caused by a treacherous blend of global warming, a warmer than-normal Atlantic, an El Niño weather pattern, and deforestation. All of this has raised temperatures and disrupted rainfall patterns in the country. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest coffee grower, months of drought in 2024 were followed by severe, climate-fueled flooding from Typhoon Yagi.
These weather extremes have made coffee more expensive. Folgers, Maxwell House, and Nescafe are among the many brands that have increased prices. On average, U.S. shoppers paid 12.7 percent more for roasted coffee in June than they did a year prior. Instant coffee prices were up even more.
Cocoa and chocolate chips have gotten pricier, too. Cocoa futures prices — what buyers pay for cocoa to be delivered to the U.S. from producing countries — tripled in 2024, hitting an all time high before settling slightly this year at levels. They are still more than double what they were a few years ago. Increasingly, these higher costs are trickling down to consumers: Lindt and Nestle‘ both raised prices in 2025, and Hershey said in July that it would, too.
Lots of issues will affect our pantries
Lots of issues are driving the global cocoa shortage. In West Africa, where 70 percent of the world’s beans are produced, insect-borne disease, smuggling, excessive rainfall, and illegal mining can all cut into harvests, said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at the research organization Climate Central. So can excessive heat. A study published by Climate Central in February 2025 found that over the last decade climate change has added at least three weeks per year of temperatures above the optimal range for cacao trees during the main growing season in Côte D’Ivoire and Ghana. When temperatures are too hot, Dahl said, leaves that would typically shade the bean-containing cacao pods can wither. “Those beans can essentially get scorched,” she explained. “And so all kinds of things can get affected. From the yield of the crop to the quality and the taste.”
The taste and the price of vanilla have also been impacted by global warming. Eighty percent of the world’s vanilla beans come from Madagascar. There, climate change is making the regular barrage of cyclones more damaging. In 2017, Cyclone Enawo and its 145 mile-per-hour winds cut the country’s vanilla harvest by 20 percent and led to what the flavoring company Cook’s Vanilla dubbed “hurricane vanilla” — beans hastily harvested before they’d had a chance to fully develop, kneecapping their ambrosial flavor. The price of vanilla tripled in the wake of the storm, adding more volatility to an industry marked by price swings at the best of times.
Adapting to extreme weather when growing ingredients
For dessert’s sake, adaptation to increasingly extreme weather is the name of the game. In Brazil, irrigation is looking increasingly critical for coffee farming. Across the Atlantic in West Africa, planting heat-blocking shade trees could help cacao. In Madagascar, agroforestry could help protect vanilla orchids from stronger cyclones.
But adaptation, in whatever form it takes, can be expensive and difficult. That’s why Michael Hoffmann, professor emeritus at Cornell University’s Department of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is skeptical that further climate impacts to my favorite baking ingredients can be avoided — though he leaves the door open. “Costs are going to go up. Availability, quality will also change,” he said, “unless we really behave and make the changes we need as a society.”
Hoffmann said that coming to terms with the risks to our favorite foods could encourage us to “get political, get involved,” to demand those changes. And I tend to agree. What, after all, could possibly be more important than saving dessert?
Story by Caroline Saunders
Styling by Keith Recker
Photography by Dave Bryce
Subscribe to TABLE Magazine’s print edition.
