A new form of chocolate

Chocolate is undeniably delicious and popular. You only have to see the millions of bars sold everyday around the world to know this is true. Chocolate is also wasteful insofar as making it uses only part of the cocoa fruit – the seeds – the rest of the fruit is simply discarded as a waste product. Sure, it can be pulped and recycled for use as fertiliser or some other uses – but wouldn’t it be better if it could be used to actually make chocolate was well rather than to rot in fields as most of it is?

That’s exactly what the Swiss, well known for their love of chocolate have achieved in a recent scientific breakthrough. What’s more their new process doesn’t even involve the use of sugar!

Scientists at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich say the new process includes the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice and the husk, or endocarp and the resulting product has a sweeter fruitier taste – something like pineapple. Needless to say t

Needless to say, the new chocolate has attracted the attention of sustainable food companies. The process relies heavily on the juice that is contained in the husk which is about 14 per cent sugar. This is distilled into a highly concentrated syrup then combined with the pulp and then the dried husk to produce a very sweet cocoa gel. This gel is then combined with cocoa beans to make the chocolate removing the need for extra added sugar, making the product a whole lot healthier than the traditional chocolate manufacturing process.

This new form of chocolate could be a game changer for the industry as soaring prices for cocoa beans and endemic poverty among cocoa farmers is rife. By using the whole cocoa fruit farmers will get paid better and there will be less waste in the whole process making it much more sustainable.