We’ve got some really bad news for all you mocha drinkers out there: The price of coffee and chocolate is like your nervous system after you’ve overindulged in one or the other: It’s having trouble settling down.

Cocoa and coffee finished 2024 as the world’s fastest-gaining commodities for the second year in a row. The tight supply of both beans meant trading prices were extremely volatile, and the result was that cocoa almost tripled in price over the course of the year. So what does 2025 have in store for the jitteriest commodities on the market?

Climate Change and Tariffs: The Perfect Storm

The driving force behind whipsawing coffee and cocoa prices is climate change and the increasing extreme weather events that come with it. Crops that grow in tropical climes are particularly exposed, and businesses are already guarding against a less fecund equator. Starbucks has reacted by investing in coffee bean research and development, looking for ways to breed hardier crops. Rather than rely on botany, Hershey’s kicked the year into high gear by petitioning the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to let it buy a 90,000-ton mountain of cocoa beans, sources told Bloomberg.

We don’t yet know what weather events 2025 will bring, but an analyst report from ING predicted the market will remain tight for both cocoa and coffee. It did offer a glimmer of hope that cocoa bean supplies will return to surplus after being in deficit last year. However, 2025 will bring geopolitical storms as well as meteorological ones:

• At the end of this year, the EU is putting a new anti-deforestation law into effect that will place the onus on companies offering commodities in EU markets to prove that those commodities did not come from recently deforested land. The landmark legislation was originally meant to kick in last year and sparked a run on prices in the run-up to its proposed start date, but was postponed until the end of this year, so expect to see another caffeine high in December.
• US President-elect Donald Trump’s promised tariffs will also have wide-ranging effects on the commodities industry as a whole, and coffee and cocoa are no exception, given neither are grown in large quantities in the US. Hawaii is the only US state that has any commercial cocoa and coffee bean farms to speak of, though some farmers in California and Florida have tried growing coffee on a small scale.

Bittersweet: Despite cocoa’s incredible performance on the market over the past two years, some cocoa farmers are throwing in the towel, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s biggest cocoa-producing countries, are paid fixed rates for their beans by the countries’ governments, meaning price spikes in the market didn’t benefit them even as they contend with a virus and bad weather obliterating crop yields.

It’s like Coachella for the healthcare business. Some 8,000 industry movers and shakers are expected today for the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, or simply JPM as it’s known to regulars.

The four-day, invite-only palaver kicks off its 43rd edition in downtown San Francisco, and one word is hanging over this year’s gathering: deals.

Networking for a Spark

JPM is a key showcase for healthcare firms big and small to show off clinical milestones and new projects to peers and industry-expert investors. Pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer will be on hand, as will artificial intelligence giant Nvidia.

Last year, Nvidia held a fireside chat with clinical stage Utah biotech Recursion, which it backs, and the $3 trillion tech giant is returning this year to participate in another fireside. Behind the presentations, meanwhile, is perhaps the more important aspect of the event: the confab. Thousands turn up for the networking alone, with official attendees often rushing from one room to another to hold meetings with other companies, analysts, government officials, and others who are rarely, if ever, in the same place at the same time. This year, the hope is that attendees might lay the groundwork for thawing an icy period in dealmaking: 

• More than 150 drugs worth $200 billion in annual sales — including Keytruda, Eliquis and Opdivo — have patent expirations from last year to 2030, according to healthcare consulting firm ZS. That’s a generational-level patent cliff on par with 2011, when the industry faced losing $250 billion in drug revenue, and means larger firms will be on the hunt for promising new ways to bridge the coming gap.
• More than three quarters of life sciences and healthcare executives told Deloitte in a survey they expect M&A to increase in 2025 thanks to the patent cliff. That’s clearing a very low bar, however: Health-care sector deals have fallen to a decade-low total value, according to Bloomberg data, and it’s been more than a year since there was a biotech acquisition worth over $5 billion.

Pierre Jacquet, the managing director of LEK Consulting’s health-care practice, told Bloomberg several big pharma firms are nevertheless being cautious because “drugs that were acquired or licensed haven’t performed as expected.” He also noted fewer attractive M&A targets now than there were from 2017 to 2021.

Reasons for Optimism: Bryan Spieman, the chief growth officer at biopharma research consulting firm Advarra, noted last week that more than 50 firms announced private equity financing rounds of $100 million or more in 2024, and that follow-on issuance activity in the biotech sector rose 64% during the year, according to UBS. The strong private financing, he noted, comes as the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump is likely to be more open to M&A “than the Biden administration has been, with its aggressive stance ultimately pausing or blocking proposed deals.”

Meta may have had an audience of one in mind when it changed its content moderation policies last week, but the move could alienate a crowd it’s typically cared about a whole lot more: advertisers.

Just ask bigwigs in the advertising industry, who told the Financial Times in a feature published this weekend they fear seeing their brands on Meta platforms appearing next to toxic content, such as hate speech or disinformation, and are considering fleeing the platform. But where are the safe — and lucrative — havens for advertisers to turn to?

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Men World

Meta wants its content moderation policies to look a lot more like those of X-née-Twitter, which is owned and operated by Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk and has replaced professional fact checkers with a “community notes” feature and offers a relatively higher level of tolerance for posts featuring controversial content. Advertisers, of course, have fled X en masse. But X has a relatively meager and seemingly shrinking user base (around 318 million monthly users, per SensorTower) compared with Meta’s Facebook (3 billion MAUs) and Instagram (2 billion MAUs).

Which means Meta is essentially betting that advertisers simply can’t walk away from the global network effects of its ginormous user base. And by the way, likely helping matters is the reality that good digital advertising real estate may soon be harder to come by:

• Only Google rivals Meta’s reach in the gargantuan digital advertising world, which PricewaterhouseCoopers projects to become a $1 trillion market within years. Meta did around $132 billion in ad revenue in 2023, and is on track to surpass it in fiscal-year 2024 (it reports its fourth-quarter earnings at the end of the month).
• Meanwhile, rival platform TikTok’s potential ban is looking likelier after a rocky day for the platform at the US Supreme Court, which means its roughly $11 billion in annual US ad revenue could be up for grabs. Much of that ad content is well-suited to Instagram as well, which last year made up over half of Meta’s ad revenue, according to a report from eMarketer; Instagram’s upbeat lifestyle content is less likely to be affected by Meta’s policy changes as well.

Unsupported: If there’s one place ads aren’t showing up that much, it’s on streaming TV. Streamers generally see cheaper ad-supported tiers as a growth machine that will generate more revenue per user than premium ad-free subscription tiers. But so far, they aren’t selling that many ads, according to a recent analysis from Sherwood News. Seems like yet another reason to quit cable, where seemingly half the air time feels like advertisements these days.