Updated M&M Inflation Index & Graph - 2025

2025 is already upon us, and it’s time to update the M&Ms Inflation Index. Like some of you, I remember when a 1.69 oz packet of M&Ms was 5 cents. Yes, that’s back in the 1950s. Today, the price of that same packet has gone up to $1.79. 

For you mathematicians, that’s a whopping 3,480%! And that means the dollar’s purchasing power has gone down in the opposite direction, maybe something approaching the same amount only in reverse.

M&Ms are made by the Mars Company. (By the way, the Mars family has quite an interesting history.) They have made it a point to offer the 1.69 oz packet since the company began to make them, come hell, high water, or monetary inflation. Of course they also understood that a variety of sizes and prices can please the public, so you find their products in a plethora of different packaging.

So for the economists among you, here below I have updated the chart for the 1.69 ounce pack:

A professional economist friend of mine, Peter Earle at AIER, explained that price inflation has certainly contributed to the uptick in our favorite snack. In this particular case, however, there is another factor: cocoa bean farmers are having terrible problems with their crops, especially in Africa where most of them are produced. 

Here’s a chart giving the price of cocoa for the last five years, from TradingEconomics.com:

The price has risen about 340%in the past year and a half – quite extraordinary, and most probably not just due to monetary inflating of the money supply.  J.P. Morgan has what I judge to be a reasonable explanation of the cocoa phenomenon. They describe the causes of the increase in the price to be mostly due to local economic, political, social, and market pressures, not linked directly to monetary inflating, other than on the retail downstream product level. One supposes that the local and international devaluation of money through monetary inflating could indeed bear some responsibility, but it's difficult to determine how much.

 We’ll just have to see, if and when the farming problems are solved, whether the price goes down. Cocoa prices have indeed subsided a bit, but on the retail M&M level will the reduction be reflected in your M&Ms? What’s your bet?

Given the market factors in the price of chocolate, our M&M Standard is perhaps imperfect. Dare I end this by stating that one of the best barometers to use in determining the loss of value of a currency is gold? Here is Kitco's gold chart showing how many dollars you get per ounce:

I also like this one from PricedinGold.com, showing how many milligrams of gold you can buy for a dollar. It really hits where it hurts. And for this you can blame the indebted-dollar farmers at the Fed and the distributors of these inflated and borrowed dollars: Congress.