Have Swiss scientists made a chocolate breakthrough?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
EDIT: nevermind me, apparently cocoa pods have sucrose as well.
this world is exhausting at times.
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?
In case anyone didn't recognize the name: it's more commonly known (at least in my experience) as "ETH Zürich"
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 secure global food supply benefits the general public not just argo businesses. In essence everyone has a vested interest in farming.
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/no1-whole-fruit-choco...
Is this accurate? I had no idea.
For volume, I'd say a pineapple is a better comparison.
No. They just use more sugar.
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.
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.
Ha, Neuken in de Keuken, is the only Dutch I know.
Nowadays their slogan is "Crazy about chocolate. Serious about people".
They seem to constantly weaken their slogan.
As suspected, UTZ guarantees are weakest by far.
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).
What if they use child slavery but pretend not to and just charge more? Plenty of those cases got revealed.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/heavy-metals-fou...
a more recent CR test here: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/a-third-o...
and one from Bryan Johnson (anti-aging tech millionaire): https://youtu.be/RzWWOQMLttE
But they too fall victim to the need to exaggerate every story to get better headlines.
In this case, they came up with ridiculously stringent standards allowing them to suggest danger where there isn't.
On the other hand, it is good that the outliers get scolded and hopefully they improve their processes as a result.
Which are those? Because most of those "made from Fairtrade/ethically sourced cocoa" labels you see on most chocolate bars are worth exactly dogshit.
[0] https://nordicchocolate.se/chokladbutik/
Oh, and the flavour and texture is great. Lindt has nothing on these ones :-)
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.
...?
Quality labels are a thing, why couldn't an independent NGO overwatch the production?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fairtrade_Certif...
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.
Subsidies.
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.
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.
Thats where my hippy parents get their chocolate and I mean that in a positive way.
It has relatively little to do with Europe either.
Go for Tony’s imo.
https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-for...
So no, not a trillion times more likely. But it's interesting that that's your first conclusion.
Guess I should read deeper before replying.
I recently was at a chocolate farm in Central America and they did talk about this change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The cost of "upgrading" your chocolate to good or even great will run you about $100 a year. Worth it, in my books.
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).
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.
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.
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!