KILCHBERG - The gold rabbit has lost its keeper. Lindt and Sprüngli announced on Monday that its board of directors has separated from chief executive Adalbert Lechner with immediate effect, an unusually abrupt end at a company that prefers its succession stories slow and polished.
The trigger was commercial, not personal. The group has had to cut its sales forecast twice, and the reason is sitting in every supermarket aisle. Cocoa costs forced the company to raise its prices sharply, and customers in its three most important markets, Switzerland, Germany and Britain, responded the way economics textbooks say they will: they bought less chocolate.
A crisis made of cocoa
The cocoa rally of the past two years has been the defining stress test for every chocolate maker on the planet. Premium brands like Lindt were supposed to be insulated, on the theory that shoppers who buy pralines at luxury prices do not count pennies. That theory met its limits in 2026. Even loyal customers traded down, waited for promotions or simply walked past the display.
Lechner's answer was to protect margins with price, and for a while the strategy held. But each new increase narrowed the pool of buyers, and the volume losses eventually became too large for the board to wave through. Two forecast cuts in one year is the sort of record that focuses directors' minds, and on Monday it focused them into action.
The safe pair of hands returns
Dieter Weisskopf, who ran the company before Lechner and knows its factories, brands and investors intimately, takes over on an interim basis. The choice signals continuity rather than revolution: the board wants a steady quarter, not a strategic u-turn. No timetable was given for a permanent appointment.
The departure caps a difficult season for Swiss consumer champions. Richemont has been trimming jobs at Montblanc's watchmaking site in Le Locle, Migros is cutting 57 positions at its Ecublens food plant, and now the most Swiss brand of them all has changed leaders mid-crisis. The common thread is a customer, at home and abroad, who has started to say no to Swiss prices. What the new leadership in Kilchberg can change is how much chocolate the world is asked to pay for. What it cannot change is the cocoa tree.