CHAMBLEE, Ga. — After months of tariff uncertainty and supply chain woes, candymakers are scrambling to fill holidays orders that will decide whether their months of planning pay off.
Channel 2 Actions News Anchor Jorge Estevez spoke to the owner of Jardi Chocolates in Chamblee who says she spent all of last year’s revenue to avoid the cost of tariffs and save her customers money.
“Came January, I asked all of my distributors: ‘whatever chocolate you already have in the States, I want it,’” said Jardi Chocolates owner Jocelyn Dubuke. “I didn’t want to go to my customers halfway through the year and say, hey, you’ve been buying at this price for however many years, now all of a sudden your cost is doubled.”
Dubuke started learning the chocolate business while working in the Atlanta restaurant industry. After years making chocolates in-house, she opened her own wholesale business to sell chocolate treats to Atlanta restaurants, hotels and holiday shoppers.
“Chocolate has very specific rules,” Dubuke said. “You can bend them, but you really can’t break them.”
For some of her high end chocolates, as much as 100% of a 12-gram candy is made with imported ingredients. When tariff talks began late last year, it pushed her to spend all of her cash to keep prices stable.
“I run a very high end side of the industry, so I’m still a luxury good,” Dubuke said. “When people can’t afford groceries, they’re probably not buying thirty dollar boxes of chocolate.”
While tariffs are typically meant to encourage businesses to produce certain goods here in the United States, with chocolate it’s not that easy.
Chocolate begins as the seeds of a tropical fruit tree that doesn’t grow in the US. Those raw cacao seeds are shipped from countries like Ghana and the Ivory Coast to places in North America and Western Europe where they get processed and sweetened into the chocolate that we eat as candy.
With such a long journey from farm to checkout, chocolate is especially vulnerable to supply disruptions.
Between raw cacao supply issues heading into 2025 and the Trump administration’s tariffs, the production cost of chocolate candy rose 30% between December 2024 and September 2025 according to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve.
“It’s still a good business decision; I would make it again in a heartbeat,” Dubuke said. “But it was just in that moment — just heart sinking. I spent all of my capital and I didn’t actually need to.”
And she still doesn’t know if that investment will pay off.
“I’m gonna roll through this year as best as I can and just hope it gets better,” she said.
It could have been worse. Dubuke initially worried taxes on imported chocolate could reach 50%, far higher than the 10% tax the Trump administration eventually imposed.
Nothing was certain yet when Dubuke started making plans. Across the industry, most chocolate businesses plan out the holiday season months in advance.
This year, chocolate makers say tariffs added even more uncertainty to that long term planning.
“This is the busy season, absolutely,” said Sander Wolf, president of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association. “Even if the tariffs just changed today, they would have had to have planned that from six months ago, seven months ago.”
That early planning left many candy makers with fewer options. Some adapted recipes appeared, such as pistachio paste-filled Dubai bars. Because the fillings means each pieces uses less cacao, candy makers can stretch supplies while still offering a luxury experience.
The bars exploded in popularity following a social media trend, offering a lifeline for many who were struggling to sell more expensive chocolate to stressed consumers.
“It was a happy coincidence for sure,” Wolf said.
But for others, managing tariffs on top of the rest of the business could have led to a bitter end.
“Your most important ingredient just got really hard to get,” said Georgia State University economist Sina Golara. “You’re only left with bad choices.”
Golara teaches supply chain management at Georgia State University. He said tariffs likely pushed some chocolate makers to invest outside of the United States.
“Tariffs are likely doing the opposite of what they were supposed to do,” Golara told Channel 2 Action News.
He pointed to some large producers moving some production to Canada and Mexico, where they can avoid tariffs on raw ingredients and still benefit from special trade deals with the US under USMCA.
But for small businesses like Jardi Chocolates, that isn’t an option. Dubuke’s entire operation relies on just one chocolate wheel that she plans to keep spinning for as long as she can.
“I stand by the products that I make; I’m not going to go to a lesser quality chocolate,” Dubuke said. “At the end of the day, this is my life. My name is on the door and I’m not going to diminish that.”
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