Swiss Scientists Engineer New Way of Creating Chocolate

Thought Question: If you were to repurpose something that usually gets thrown away, what would it be and how would you use it?

Perhaps coming to a store near you: more chocolaty chocolate. 

Switzerland is a country famous for its cocoa creations. Now, a Swiss team of food scientists has invented a new method of making chocolate. It has candy makers and conservationists drooling with joy. That’s because it uses the whole cocoa fruit to produce chocolate’s trademark sweetness, rather than sugar from other sources.   

The result? “A rich, dark but sweet flavour, with a hint of cocoa bitterness that would fit (nicely) with an after dinner coffee,” a BBC reporter wrote after sampling the new treat.  

Scientists at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich used parts of the cocoa fruit normally left in fields to rot. "It's like you throw away the apple and just use its seeds. That's what we do right now with the cocoa fruit," Anian Schreiber told the BBC. Schreiber is co-founder of a Swiss sustainable cocoa grower.

Researchers found that cocoa husks are rich in sweet juices. So they drained that juice and concentrated it. They then rejoined it with the fruit husk. That made a gel that held more than enough sweetness to create chocolate. Using it cuts down on waste. It also scraps the need to ship sugar to chocolate makers. And it earns farmers more for each cocoa fruit they harvest.  

"(It’s) very promising,” Roger Wehrli, director of the association of Swiss chocolate makers, told the BBC. “If you use the whole cocoa fruit, you can get better prices. So it's economically interesting for the farmers. And it's interesting from an ecological point of view."    

Photo of cocoa from Unsplash courtesy of Pablo Merchán Montes.