Imagine picking up a nice juicy apple – but instead of biting into it you keep the seeds and throw the rest away.
That’s what chocolate producers have traditionally done with the cocoa fruit – used the beans and disposed of the rest.
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.
The chocolate, developed at Zurich’s prestigious Federal Institute of Technology by scientist Kim Mishra and his team includes the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice, and the husk, or endocarp.
The process has already attracted the attention of sustainable food companies.
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.
The key to the new chocolate lies in its very sweet juice, which tastes, Mr Mishra explains, “very fruity, a bit like pineapple”.
This juice, which is 14% sugar, is distilled down to form a highly concentrated syrup, combined with the pulp and then, taking sustainability to new levels, mixed with the dried husk, or endocarp, to form a very sweet cocoa gel.
The gel, when added to the cocoa beans to make chocolate, eliminates the need for refined sugar.
Mr Mishra sees his invention as the latest in a long line of innovations by Swiss chocolate producers.
In the 19th Century, Rudolf Lindt, of the famous Lindt chocolate family, accidentally invented the crucial step of “conching” the chocolate – rolling the warm cocoa mass to make it smooth and reduce its acidity – by leaving a cocoa mass mixer running overnight. The result in the morning? Deliciously smooth, sweet chocolate.
“You need to be innovative to maintain your product category,” says Mr Mishra. “Or… you will just make average chocolate.”
Mr Mishra was partnered in his project by KOA, a Swiss start-up working in sustainable cocoa growing. Its co-founder, Anian Schreiber, believes using the entire cocoa fruit could solve many of the cocoa industry’s problems, from the soaring price of cocoa beans to endemic poverty among cocoa farmers.
“‘Instead of fighting over who gets how much of the cake, you make the cake bigger and make everybody benefit,” he explains.
“The farmers get significantly extra income through utilising cocoa pulp, but also the important industrial processing is happening in the country of origin. Creating jobs, creating value that can be distributed in the country of origin.”
Mr Schreiber describes the traditional system of chocolate production, in which farmers in Africa or South America sell their cocoa beans to big chocolate producers based in wealthy countries as “unsustainable”.
