Local bakers are feeling the heat from a global cocoa shortage but are refusing to cut back on one of the world’s favourite treats — chocolate.

Cocoa prices have surged 150 per cent this year, on top of a 300 per cent increase last year, in turn pushing up the cost of chocolate.

Restaurant group Take Five chief executive Kentis Kishtoo has seen the price of chocolate rise by 15 to 20 per cent in the past two years.

He said most of the baked goods that his restaurants sold contained chocolate.

“It does have an impact on local businesses,” Mr Kishtoo said. “As a company we try to hold on to our selling price as much as we can and wait for the inflation to pass. If not, then we make a price change to our selling product.”

Despite the new challenges, Take Five has resisted increasing the price of its sweet treats.

Thomas Bekhazi, the owner of Hamilton French bakery L’Artisan Boulangerie has also seen a significant increase in chocolate prices across the board.

“We have particularly seen this in chocolate batons, which we use in chocolate croissants,” he said. “We are not using less of those and have not increased prices, either. Chocolate croissants are staples of our bakery and have been at the same price since we opened four years ago.”

Home bakery MLK & HNY has also felt the burn.

“Most of our products include chocolate, so we have had to start purchasing in bulk versus the individual ingredients like we had done before,” co-owners Tomei Swan and Jaylen Ever said. “It works out cheaper and lasts longer.”

Crow Lane Bakery president Raymond Packwood said they were not as impacted because not many of their products included chocolate.

“Yes, the price of chocolate has gone up, but so has everything else,” Mr Packwood said.

Chocolate is consumed by 90 per cent of people worldwide but two thirds of cocoa is grown in West Africa, primarily in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.

Since last year climate change has been badly impacting cocoa crops in the region. Weeks of record high temperatures have produced conditions not optimal for cocoa production. Bloomberg’s financial website has declared a chocolate crisis.

Epidemics of plant viruses and fungi have also contributed to a cocoa deficit of roughly 500,000 tonnes last year, the largest shortfall in more than 60 years.

Adding to Bermuda’s chocolate woes are American President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports, which came into effect this year.

An April article in The Guardian, predicted that these taxes would likely keep the price of chocolate candy up for the foreseeable future.

The rising cost of chocolate has left some manufactures scrambling to find cocoa alternatives, such as sunflower seeds, oats, barley, fava beans and grape seeds.