RTÉ's Adam Maguire had an exclusive scoop that he shared on Today with Claire Byrne. After much extensive, gruelling investigative journalism, he was able to reveal what he’d uncovered live on air:
"I can tell you that chocolate is delicious. I can confirm that."
Yes, 'tis the season to be disgustingly over-indulgent in chocolate. Some people have been denying themselves all sorts of deliciousness for weeks, just so they can dive headfirst into a mound of overpriced, super-sugary chocolate on Easter Sunday.
Who needs roast lamb when you can have a dark chocolate egg with salted caramel truffles?
When he’s not doing extremely chocolatey taste tests, Adam is a business reporter and he gave Claire some surprising stats on the average annual consumption of chocolate in different parts of the world.
Despite our fondness for it, Irish people are not near the top of the heap when it comes to scoffing cocoa solids, milk and sugar. The average person around the world eats about 900g of chocolate, Adam reveals, which really doesn’t sound like an awful lot.
There’ll likely be some people around the country who’ll put that much away on Easter Sunday alone. So why so low?:
"It is a global figure, so it includes a lot of people who eat little or no chocolate, maybe because of their culture, or it’s not in the diet or because it’s too much of a luxury. And, you know, we probably don’t think of chocolate as a luxury here, but it really is for a lot of people."
But what about Ireland? How do we match up against that – admittedly pretty low – global figure? We fly far past it of course:
"According to Teagasc, in 2020 the average person here ate 3.6 kilos of chocolate over the course of the year. So, way, way above many countries, way above the global average and it would actually be above what we’d see in the UK, they’re about 3 kilos a year."
We are, apparently, on a par with France. And if 3.6 kilos of chocolate sounds like a lot, in terms of our near neighbours, it’s not. We are, shamefully, below the European average of 5 kilos. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, the US consumes way more than we do and way more than the European average that we can only aspire to: 9 kilos per person per year. This is shocking to Claire:
"What? More than double what we consume? And, and – sorry to interrupt you – they eat bad chocolate."
Sorry, US people, but Claire is right. You guys eat bad, bad chocolate. The sort that, as Adam puts it, is made from fake milk and leaves a sickly taste at the back of your throat. How could anybody eat 9 kilos of that? But despite their incomprehensible appetite for large amounts of Hershey's "chocolate", our American cousins are not the largest consumers in the world. That honour is bestowed upon the Swiss:
"Switzerland is top of the table. Per capita, 11.6 kilos of chocolate per year eaten by Swiss people, who spend about $270 per year on chocolate. So they’re massive, massive chocolate eaters."
And, Claire is quick to point out, the Swiss are eating the good stuff. No fake milk or polyglycerol polyricinoleate for those guys. Of course, the good stuff doesn’t come cheap and chocolate, as Adam told Claire, is big business:
"Estimated to be worth north of $1 trillion a year, the global industry. Here in Ireland, Teagasc says, chocolate sales hit about €200m in 2020. It’s hard to get precise figures on more recent sales, but it’s probably a good bit higher than that."
Indeed, chocolate consumption during Covid was likely quite a bit higher than that, as many of us sat in our bubbles, watching Emily in Paris and snapping triangles off our Swiss chocolates. And when the Easter Bunny comes on Sunday, it’ll mean lots of chocolate for the – ahem – children who will be bursting with excitement, but it will also mean lots of money for the chocolate industry:
"There are four key points in the chocolate makers’ calendar. So you have Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter and then Christmas... They’re the four key periods and within that, Easter is one of, if not the biggest of the four."
Bird Bia estimate that Easter represents around 40% of Irish chocolate sales. One day accounting for 40% of sales – Easter Sunday has a lot riding on it. Let’s hope that Bunny brings his A-game (and lots of the good stuff).
You can hear Claire’s full chat with Adam by going here.