> But now food scientists in Switzerland have come up with a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit rather than just the beans - and without using sugar.
That's "without sugar" in the same way that PoE devices "don't need power". They use the sugar from the fruit rather than supplementing additional one, as is the usual procedure.
yeah but it will be marketed towards the consuming masses as "no added sugar" when it may in fact have more sugar in it than the previous method where sugar was added.
> They say traditional chocolate production, using only the beans, involves leaving the rest of the cocoa fruit – the size of a pumpkin and full of nutritious value - to rot in the fields.
Wouldn't this deliver the exact nutrients needed for cocoa bean production back to the soil? Of does this practice invite harmful bacteria and diseases?
Of course it is. Nobody else is going to fund such research.
That's true in pretty much every industry. That's why papers have "conflicts" sections, so you know who's funding it, and can take that into account. That doesn't make it wrong. You just need to put it in context.
A great deal of agricultural research is funded/carried out by governments who don’t have a vested interest in a particular outcome beyond general improvement.
A secure global food supply benefits the general public not just argo businesses. In essence everyone has a vested interest in farming.
Well, the size of a very small pumpkin. It's not a good comparison, partly because pumpkins vary so widely in size. It does have a shape similar to an elongated pumpkin.
For volume, I'd say a pineapple is a better comparison.
For those who don't want to read, they distill the cacao juice, mix it with the pureed husk, and then use that instead of sugar in the chocolate. The process is more expensive than using sugar itself, which is the cheapest part of chocolate production.
Then there's some romantic pontificating that this will somehow alleviate West Africa from modern day colonialism/child slavery or lower the price of chocolate.
So no, Swiss scientists have not made a chocolate breakthrough.
Buy your chocolate from companies that don't use child slavery, even if it's more expensive.
I don't think it is necessarily "romantic pontificating". They've effectively found (or more likely "refound" given there were probably indigenous recipes like this for centuries) that you can "cider" the chocolate fruit and like apple cidering the most effective (industrial) application of this process will be close to the source of the fruit rather than at an industrial junction of commerce such as Switzerland with access to shipments of both cheap industrial sugar and expensively labored cocoa beans.
Even if the cocoa fruit sugars are more expensive in the markets of Switzerland than other sugars, the cheapest source of sugar at the cocoa plantation itself is still going to be the "leftover"/"waste" fruit. If the recipe these Swiss scientists have come up with is good enough, producers could start to build "whole chocolate" directly near the plantations and better compete in that market directly rather than in the cocoa bean "ingredient" market. That would lower the price of chocolate (more suppliers, shorter supply chains with fewer middlemen).
If there's "romantic pontification" in the article it's as much or more the multiple reassurances that Swiss chocolate would remain relevantly competitive (and not just an expensive reminder of a bygone era) to such a massive increase of suppliers with access to existing "waste" products, should it happen.
ETA: And/or such a process might open up a much larger market for shipping the whole fruit, not just the beans, and moving the expensive labor parts closer to the industrial hubs. That would also obviously alleviate labor problems at the edges (plantations), incentivize reducing/eliminating labor with industrial tools that wasn't as incentivized before, and might also bring production costs down overall (for cheaper, more sustainable chocolate).
> Even if the cocoa fruit sugars are more expensive in the markets of Switzerland than other sugars, the cheapest source of sugar at the cocoa plantation itself is still going to be the "leftover"/"waste" fruit.
Not necessarily. Chocolate abhors moisture, so sugars derived from the fruit and pulp will need to be extensively dehydrated. Over some range of energy and capital costs versus refined sugar cost, it may still be more expensive to have "whole fruit" processing on-site than to import refined sugar for processing.
> If the recipe these Swiss scientists have come up with is good enough, producers could start to build "whole chocolate" directly near the plantations and better compete in that market directly rather than in the cocoa bean "ingredient" market.
Is the expense of sugar really what makes the rest of the production chain (roasting, grinding, and final processing) infeasible on-site?
> And/or such a process might open up a much larger market for shipping the whole fruit, not just the beans, and moving the expensive labor parts closer to the industrial hubs.
If you're contemplating shipping the whole fruit without processing, I think this would still be infeasible. The fruit is wet, which would vastly increase the shipping cost per kilogram of final chocolate. Shipping the raw fruit might also require a cold chain, depending on how likely it is to ferment or spoil en-route.
You can analogize this to bulk shipments of sugar, where as I understand it early-stage milling is done near the sugar cane/beet plantations to remove most of the moisture. The raw cane sugar is largely dry, and it can be cost-effectively transported to sugar refineries for further processing.
> Not necessarily. Chocolate abhors moisture, so sugars derived from the fruit and pulp will need to be extensively dehydrated.
Right. Definitely a place in this story where most of the questions are in the specifics of the process/method implied. About the only specific we get in the article is that the process seems to involve gelling (jello-ing?) the fruit pulp/rind in some way. I'm sure there are interesting twists involved that will be in the scientific literature and/or patents.
It's fairly hard to do, but the ones that make an effort will generally at least have the Fair Trade logo. (UTZ is an weak industry-initiated alternative that does not cut it, as I understand it.)
It's all of them.
Tony Chocolonely's whole image is to be as fairtrade as possible and even they admit that they can not guarantee no forced labour was used in their production chain.
They could easily insource their entire operation in order to guarantee slave free chocolate, but you would end up with very expensive chocolate. That is probably why they dropped their "100 percent slave free" slogan. They still need to make a profit and at the moment you can only do that with slave labour.
Yes, looking for fair trade labelled products is important, and I also believe it is important to look for the International Fairtrade Certification Mark ...
As with any such program, if it is implementing effectively then some companies will chafe at the requirements and try to develop their own fair trade program more to their liking.
There's a John Oliver episode about the chocolate industry, you can check it out on YouTube.
Of course there's no logo saying the chocolate is made with child slavery, I hope you didn't mean to be snarky here.
There are initiatives to try to alleviate the problem, the only example I have in mind right now is Tony's Chocolonely (which explains the problem and their solution on their website) but I'm sure others could come up with other initiatives.
The trends from top companies of chocolate is that they try to do as little as possible to alleviate the problem of child slavery in chocolate production.
It's expensive, easy to bypass, and has little enforcement teeth.
Expensive because you need to pay an inspector (ideally multiple to avoid corruption) to visit these farms.
Easy to bypass because the kids aren't working the fields all the time and there's plenty of warning an inspector is coming.
And the enforcement mechanism is you don't get the label... But like there's plenty of buyers for slave chocolate so that mostly means a minor hit on income.
NGO inspectors are better than nothing, but we should be clear eyed in how much they can solve. The only way to significantly reduce slave labor is harsh penalties on companies that trade in slave goods. That was pretty much the only thing that collapsed the ivory market.
You could buy a large plot of land in Ghana or Nigeria. Start a large cacao plantation. Hire locals to do the labour intensive work for you. And then fly in management from Western European countries to oversee the operation and to make sure that no children set foot on the plantation.
In the US, I can't even really buy chocolate anymore. About 3 or 4 years ago, it suddenly changed flavor... now it tastes like brown-colored wax to me. It was sudden and noticeable, and if I looked through old posts I could narrow it down to a particular month. This was across the board for all things Nestle and Hershey. Maybe if I got some snobby Eurochocolate, but I wouldn't know where. And sometimes I just like (or want to like) the candy bars I'd get as a kid. It's not the only food that's undergone one of these "now with 10% less sawdust" scenarios, Kraft mac'n'cheese comes to mind.
One could be forgiven for thinking that, but about a year later I found articles talking about how they decided to remove cocoa butter from their recipes because it cost too much.
The mac'n'cheese thing was funny too. There were half a dozen reddit threads with people complaining that it started tasting different. Then, completely oblivious, Kraft does a press release a few months later about how they changed the formula and it was so successful no one even noticed. Whatever minuscule amount of cheese they used in the powder cost too much and was replaced with god knows what.
Substitution-flation made everything taste like shit, and no one even said anything.
In the food industry (and probably others) this is called salami slicing. You take one thin slice off the salami and you can’t tell the difference. Then a little while later you do it again.
Eventually the salami is half the size it used to be and nobody notices until they get the original again.
Most Americans eat garbage all day so when it gets a little garbagier they can’t tell.
I’ll be honest I didn’t really read your comment far enough to get to where you said just two companies. You said you can’t buy chocolate in the USA and we have a wealth of chocolate. I guess being a foodie when someone mentions buying chocolate to me I don’t even think of Nestle or Hersheys, anymore than I’d think of Folgers and Maxwell House if someone said “I can’t buy coffee because it all changed”.
Guess I should read deeper before replying.
I recently was at a chocolate farm in Central America and they did talk about this change.
> I’ll be honest I didn’t really read your comment far enough to get to where you said just two companies. You said you can’t buy chocolate in the USA
Those two companies account for some large fraction of marketshare in the US. And since I didn't grow up eating $10/bar Geflaggersverkenfunkenderassen swiss chocolate, those hold little appeal anyway. Thanks though for admitting you just kind of ignored what I said, I figure that goes for the downvoters too.
I mean to be fair your wording didn’t help. You started saying you can’t even buy chocolate here.
Bud and Miller own about 2/3 of the beer market but I can find 100 craft beers within a block of me. Same with chocolates. If I said that all the beer suddenly started tasting bad it would be basically the same statement you made and a reasonable person would think the problem was something to do with me. People of course skim comments so when you lead with that, it’s natural.
There was not a point in living memory where you couldn’t buy much better chocolate than Hersheys in any grocery store. So your statement doesn’t make much sense.
“Waxy” is the normal taste for chocolate produced using vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter or otherwise skimping on the dairy content (one of the main reasons why cheap US chocolate is so awful), but I don’t think that’s new in the last 3-4 years.
Multiple varieties of "snobby Eurochocolate" are sold prominently in the candy and/or snack aisles of my podunk town's Walmart and grocery store. I've never had any trouble getting it, and with domestic candy prices having gone through the roof since the pandemic, the price difference isn't as much as you might think.
A Hershey bar is like a dollar. You can find good chocolate bars for $2-3 and there's no real difference between a $7 chocolate bar and a $20 chocolate bar (unless you're buying it right at the chocolatier).
The cost of "upgrading" your chocolate to good or even great will run you about $100 a year. Worth it, in my books.
Yeah but the question is where's the proof that they actually put that into practice. Because all large corporations are full of ESG and greenwashing messages on their websites but we all know the reality is different. Missions statements are cheap.
Tony's Chocolonely is an interesting brand, because its origin lies in a Dutch TV show investigating consumer goods. At some point, the presenter ("Tony" [1]) decided to sue himself for buying slave chocolate, and then decided to see how hard it actually is to make slave-free chocolate - and Tony's Chocolonely was born.
As I understand it they're less strictly idealistic than they used to be so as to be a profitable business, but at least it wasn't an attempt at fairwashing an existing brand.
[1] Actually Teun (van de Keuken), but that doesn't work well in English.
> table should be understandable without knowing german
The "Ja" and "Nein" parts are, but I don't think, for example, "Rückverfolgbarkeit" is understandable without knowing German (having to know "UTZ" means "Rainforest Alliance" is a different issue).
One of the biggest sources of the world's sugar today is corn (as High Fructose Corn Syrup), which is a rather expensive "concentration" process but is heavily subsidized in the United States by a large number of interlocking subsidies in US's strange, complex multi-grade corn system which leads to "cheap" access of lots of "waste" corn that that is "cheap as free" enough that the expensive "concentration" efforts are still profitable at cheap costs.
One of the "best" sources of "plain" white sucrose (versus fruit's heavier balance of fructose) is sugar cane, which is a plant that prefers sub-tropical regions and often islands at that and historically required massive plantations with slave labor to get cheap and today involve massive expensive industrial harvesters and international cooperation of subsidies, grants, and colonial legacies.
Maple trees grow in northern climates and real Maple syrups are expensive today as a number of subsidies expired and demand outpaced production and even available supply.
Other fruit syrups compete against the primary uses of their fruits.
I started from USA agriculture because it dominates import/exports, but I did a winding expansion to North American and Pacific Island and Caribbean sources and then finally much of the remainder of the world's sources (though I said "fruit" and definitely forgot about beets, which few would classify as a fruit, that is something I missed). It's a global market and you can't talk about how cheap refined sugar is without starting from the cheapest/highest-volume sources of it. (Just like you can't talk about European oil prices without starting at OPEC/Middle East and then the US Gulf Coast even if you eventually wanted to just talk about Scottish off-shore oil prices. The other forces are bigger so they have an impact on the market prices.)
This one is a serious one [0]. It's a small local chocolate producer that has close contacts with other small cacao producers and buys directly from them.
How do you know their practices are better than at your typical artisanal chocolate company? The kind of claims they're making don't look unusual to me.
Not sure what you mean with artisanal, english is not my native tongue. But she is a local legend here. Been passionate about chocolate since a kid and has worked hard to build a supply chain that works to her standards. Was on the news a few times showing the local sources of her cacao. And after tasting the chocolate I believe everything she says. :-)
On a less psychotic note; products have sprung up recently that use the fruit, which I applaud. To be honest, a year ago I didn't even know we weren't using the fruit, and it seems nuts that we weren't!
If you're ever in Zürich, be sure to visit the Lindt and Sprungli chocolate museum. Book ahead for tickets. It's got the entire history of how it was turned from something more like coffee into a dessert over the course of a series of process improvements, many of which were patented by names you hear regularly today in the Swiss chocolate industry and beyond (Nestlé, Lindt, Cailler, Sprungli).
That's "without sugar" in the same way that PoE devices "don't need power". They use the sugar from the fruit rather than supplementing additional one, as is the usual procedure.