IN Brief:
- CAOBISCO is supporting an ambitious EU-Thailand free trade agreement for chocolate, confectionery, and biscuit manufacturers.
- Current Thai tariffs include 10% on chocolate and 20% on sugar confectionery and sweet biscuits.
- The association also wants workable origin rules and more diversified European access to sugar and other food ingredients.
CAOBISCO has backed progress towards an EU-Thailand free trade agreement, seeking lower import tariffs for European confectionery exports and improved access to agricultural ingredients.
The association represents more than 13,000 European businesses across chocolate, confectionery, biscuits, and related categories, most of them small and medium-sized manufacturers. Thailand offers a growing market for premium imported foods, although existing tariff levels add heavily to landed prices.
Current Thai duties include 10% on chocolate and 20% on both sugar confectionery and sweet biscuits. Reductions would give European manufacturers greater room to compete on price, pack format, distribution, and positioning without absorbing the tariff inside already constrained margins.
European confectionery exports to Thailand exceeded €60m in 2024, providing an established base rather than a speculative market entry. Additional growth would depend on the final tariff schedule, implementation periods, local distribution, and the ability of manufacturers to meet the agreement’s origin requirements.
Rules of origin are especially important for products assembled from globally traded materials. Chocolate and biscuits can combine cocoa, sugar, dairy ingredients, vegetable fats, nuts, flavours, inclusions, and packaging sourced across several countries, with processing sometimes divided between more than one European plant.
An agreement that demands an impractical proportion of local or regional content could leave the headline tariff preference unavailable to many finished products. Conversely, rules that are too permissive would weaken the agreement’s purpose by allowing goods with limited European production to qualify.
Documentation must therefore follow recipes and sourcing patterns without creating a disproportionate administrative burden. Large groups may use customs teams and integrated enterprise systems to trace materials across several sites, while smaller manufacturers can struggle when every supplier change or recipe adjustment alters the evidence required.
CAOBISCO is also seeking better European access to Thai sugar and other agricultural products. Thailand is a major sugar exporter, but its share of European supply remains limited, and greater sourcing diversity could give manufacturers another option when domestic beet output or established import routes tighten.
Introducing a new sugar source still requires technical and commercial qualification. Colour, grain size, moisture, microbiological specification, certification, logistics, and consistency all influence whether cane or beet sugar can be introduced without affecting dissolving, boiling, crystallisation, dough handling, texture, or finished-product appearance.
Freight cost, port capacity, currency, crop weather, quotas, and trade policy also determine delivered economics. A lower tariff can improve access while leaving imported sugar exposed to a long transport route and greater inventory requirements, particularly when manufacturers need to secure supply ahead of seasonal production peaks.
European factories continue to invest in regional processing while depending on internationally sourced crops. Recent expansion of chocolate and edible-oil capacity in Belgium illustrates the model: local manufacturing assets rely on stable access to cocoa, sugar, fats, and other materials moving through global supply networks.
Additional export markets can improve factory utilisation, especially where Christmas, Easter, and gifting demand concentrate output into part of the year. Thailand could provide another outlet for European production, although product selection must account for local tastes, retail structure, climate, and the cost of reaching customers beyond the main urban markets.
Chocolate faces particular distribution constraints in high heat and humidity. Temper stability, formulation, insulated transport, cold storage, secondary packaging, and final-mile handling must protect the product after customs clearance. Tariff reductions lower border cost but do not remove the technical expense of moving heat-sensitive confectionery.
Biscuits and sugar confectionery are generally less temperature sensitive, although moisture barriers, breakage control, shelf life, and pest prevention remain important. The commercial benefit of an agreement may therefore vary considerably across the categories represented by CAOBISCO.
Negotiations began in 2013, were paused in 2014, and resumed in 2023. Political agreement would still need to be translated into tariff schedules, quotas, customs processes, sanitary provisions, sustainability requirements, and implementation dates before factories could plan around the new terms.
European farmers and processors will also examine concessions granted to Thai agricultural and finished-food exports. Better ingredient access can strengthen confectionery manufacturing, but a balanced agreement must manage competition across the wider food economy without producing rules too complex to use.
The most valuable outcome would combine meaningful tariff reductions with origin requirements that reflect commercial recipes and dependable access to ingredients. Preferential rates offer little industrial benefit when the administrative evidence is more expensive than the duty saved.
Thailand can become a larger market for European value-added foods and a more important source of agricultural inputs, but the final text must work at shipment, recipe, and factory level. Commercial uptake will depend less on the announcement of an agreement than on whether manufacturers can use its provisions repeatedly without rebuilding their compliance process for every order.
