Hershey and other chocolate makers are continuing to hike prices, saying a volatile cocoa market gives them no choice.

Hershey, the maker of Reese’s, Whoppers, barkThins and other chocolate candies, said last week it will be raising retail prices later this fall. In some cases, pack sizes will get smaller; in others, list prices will rise. The average price increase will be in the low double-digit percentages.

“This change is not related to tariffs or trade policies. It reflects the reality of rising ingredient costs, including the unprecedented cost of cocoa,” Hershey said in a statement.

Hershey stressed that the price increases won’t apply to products specially packaged for Halloween.

Also last week, Swiss chocolatier Lindt said it raised prices by 15.8 percent in the first half of this year. The company said it was able to offset some of the higher cost of cocoa with long-term contracts but had to pass much of it on to consumers.

“The development of the global chocolate market in the first half of 2025 was a continuation of what we saw in 2024, with cocoa prices remaining close to record highs,” said Adalbert Lechner, Lindt’s CEO, in a conference call with investors.

Cloetta, a Swedish confectionary company, told investors earlier this month that it raised chocolate prices in the second quarter. Nestle raised American prices for products such as Toll House chocolate chips in the spring.

Cocoa prices have more than doubled over the past two years due to poor weather and disease in West Africa, which supplies more than 70 percent of the world’s cocoa.

Cocoa futures, which are binding contracts for a specific quantity of cocoa, stood at $7,380 per metric ton last week, according to the International Cocoa Organization, which releases a daily average of prices in London and New York.

That’s down from December’s peak of $11,984, but it’s still 121 percent higher than two years ago.

According to the International Cocoa Organization, prices surged in early June on concerns about production in Ivory Coast, but eased on optimistic forecasts for production in Ghana and Latin America. They rose again in late June after heavy rains in West Africa, which could worsen the outbreak of diseases that harm crops.

“It’s almost a bit dangerous to comment on this because it’s changing so fast,” Cloetta Chief Financial Officer Frans Ryden said in a conference call with investors. “This is something that’s moving hugely up and down all the time.”

Prices, meanwhile, have been rising on store shelves. The average unit price of a chocolate bar in the United States in July 2021 was $2.43, according to Nielsen IQ, a market research company.

This month, it was $3.45, a 41 percent increase.

Nielsen said unit sales of chocolate fell 1.2 percent in the year ending July 12.