ISM – CEO lunch is a winning recipe

The managing directors of confectionery producers and trading companies gathered for the first CEO lunch on the first day of ISM. Jurgen Steinemann, CEO of Barry
Callebaut, and Dr Hermann Buhlbecker, managing director and sole shareholder of Aachener Printen- und Schokoladenfabrik Henry Lambertz, discussed the “Future of the Confectionery Industry”.

Both participants judged the sector’s situation as positive. The current situation is no cause for concern, they said, even though cocoa prices and the price war in the retail food sector are posing challenges for the confectionery industry.

Steinemann did say that he expects prices for cocoa beans to increase, after surging more than 20 per cent last year, as hedge funds cause disruption in the market. “There is a bigger chance that cocoa prices will further rise than that they will fall,” he notes. “Hedge funds have been intervening in the cocoa market in the past six months. They don’t belong there, and the chocolate customer has to pay the price.”

He explained that cocoa futures jumped to a 21-year high in London in January and to a 30-year high in New York on optimism that a global economic recovery will buoy demand. Cocoa has risen in the past year on speculation that supplies will tighten from West Africa.

He did not believe that Kraft’s acquision of Cadbury will have any significant effect on the market.