A vision of chocolate's future in an Amsterdam brownie | Hacker News Reader

A vision of chocolate's future in an Amsterdam brownie

bloomberg.com

58 pointslaurex48 comments

The article covers a variety of different approaches to dealing with high cocoa prices, but the Amsterdam brownie in the title is using a more heavily alkalized cocoa powder to maintain a similar taste while using less cocoa:

> The former gets its punch from using more heavily “dutched,” or alkalized, cocoa. It’s also what made that magical brownie taste so chocolatey.

Signature taste if Oreos

Sold. I'm an Oreo slut.

If you buy dutch chocolate for baking you are told that this is actually significantly less flavorful, but a darker color, and useful for eg dark baked goods, when you're mostly trying to create a certain color shade without adding a ton of chocolate flavor.

It's inaccurate to say that dutched cocoa is less flavorful. Chocolate flavor is composed of multiple notes / experiences. Dutched cocoa has less acidic or fruity notes, but more dark rich, fudgy notes. Different, not less flavorful.

I've been enjoying many fake/replacement things for years: vegan ice-cream, beyond meat, quorn, vaping.. I'll be happy if we can move away from damaging products relying on unsustainable cocoa production.

Nice mention of Tony's Chocolonely, if you pass through the Netherlands it's one of the great gifts to pick up to take home.

Or if you just pass through a US Walmart! Tony’s is everywhere, now.

Was the vaping ironic? I know very little about the effects. Last I heard the flavors people buy are full of garbage, so this is more or less a question

Gives you popcorn lungs, but it is technically a replacement.

> Gives you popcorn lungs

This is a myth. You could be confusing the story of the factory workers who had popcorn lung, or you may be thinking of the bootleg marijuana carts which had vitamin E in the mix, in either case the story is wrong and also about a decade out of date.

Vapes do not cause popcorn lung.

https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/quit-smoking/ready-to-quit-...

There was a problem with using flavoring agents that aren't meant to be inhaled. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#E-cig... :

> The American Lung Association listed use of flavored e-cigarettes as a risk factor for BO in 2016.[37] Health Canada has, however, seen no cases as of 2023.[38] Public Health England writes that the association has come about as "some flavourings used in e-liquids to provide a buttery flavour contain the chemical diacetyl… However, diacetyl is banned as an ingredient from e-cigarettes and e-liquids in the UK."[39] The UK National Health Service's website states that "vaping does not cause 'popcorn lung'".[40]

Diacetyl is a chemical used to flavor popcorn, and is safe to eat. Inhalation leads to "popcorn lung," named because people working in microwave popcorn factories got it.

People were using analogies to the notorious industrial outbreak of "popcorn lung", because lipid pneumonia was so rare in other contexts.

What happened with vaping was that THC-containing liquids were an illegal cottage industry, being brewed up in people's garages to their novel recipes, despite the labels for selling them being fairly standardized on certain absolutely-not-a-brand-name-but-appears-to-be-one. These thousands of amateurs compared notes on dedicated forums online, and their iterative recipes had a quite good safety record... until the summer of 2019.

In the summer of 2019, some experimenter decided that vitamin E acetate ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Tocopheryl_acetate ) was actually a very effective emulsifier/thickener for their liquid, allowing an incremental increase in profitability, and posted about their experiments on one of these forums. Hundreds of fellow independent/amateur manufacturers around the world followed suit and tried it out on their next batch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaping-associated_pulmonary_in...

Suddenly heavy users started showing up in emergency rooms complaining they couldn't breath. Nobody knew the cause. It took a few weeks to recognize the trend and trace it to vaping, and the cigarette manufacturers immediately weaponized this with propaganda (regulated nicotine vapes / e-cigs retain an incorrect stigma to this day). The press labelled it "vape lung", and eventually doctors settled on EVALI. Rumors of "fake" carts abounded, everybody panicked trying to figure out what was safe and what wasn't. Eventually it was identified as a lipid pneumonia (in some cases postmortem). It took another few weeks for the CDC, some independent labs in quasi-legalized enterprises, and the relatively small niche of cannabis media to put together the pieces and break the story. Once they became aware of the consequences of vitamin E acetate (a lipid which sits inert in the lung blocking airflow), manufacturers immediately stopped using it. But the product already manufactured and sold took a while to work its way through the supply chain, leading to cases showing up all that year.

Heads up Tony's Chocoloney is available across the EU now.

It was news to me that it's an ethically driven business, I just enjoy the chocolate.

It's been available in North America as well for years.

In my grocery stores in Kenya too, for what it's worth.

It started out as a tv-documentary series on Dutch television. It's presenter was called Teun (Tony) and he wanted to be convicted for eating chocolate which he knew was produced by making use of slavery. This failed and he then created his own brand that should have been 'slavery free', which proved very difficult indeed. The brand was later taken over and made into what it is now.

So it's no longer 'ethically sourced'?

Globally, people are getting richer (particularly east Asia), and consequently using more energy and resources. Sustainability is really contingent on demand versus innovation and land encroachment; some products use more than others, but basically all will use more land/energy if demand grows enough. There's no agreed-upon benchmark for what constitutes sustainable, it's vibes. You could just as easily say that a perpetually growing global population is not sustainable, but thankfully it is projected to stall. In a scenario where the population doesn't grow (or not much), no product can be considered unsustainable.

You can yield improved efficiency for almost anything. In China, fossil-fuel use has plateaued despite growing demands for energy, because they have so much solar. Their emissions growth is finally projected to stall, but the coal mining has hindered that somewhat.

The U.S. hasn't seen significant land-use increase for agriculture over the years, in fact there's been less. Some of that is innovation, but some is also cruel commercial practices. As the States move away from that animal products will get yet more expensive in the short-run, and consumers will more readily look to alts. Actually the subsidies have been driving down prices for those, but everyone seems quick to defend them as though farmers couldn't possibly do without. Animal products are cheaper in the U.S. than many developed countries. If you really wanted to scale back that consumption, all it would take is to allow the products to be more expensive; simple.

Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.

One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.

I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.

I find critiques of palm oil accurate, but it begs the question - what is your preferred source of saturated dietary fat? You can do all sorts of things with vegetable oils from seeds/legumes, but you need saturated triglycerides for high melting point products like chocolate or to maximize the stability of deep-frying.

Maybe we could go back to artificially hydrogenated oils, but actually give a damn about food safety this time and work out an industrial process to separate trans fats?

Is Tonys different in the US? Just got a bar of it and it was alright Aldis brand milk chocolate blows it out of the water

> alt-chocolate is here to stay, in the same way that it’s become commonplace to gorge on a passable meat-free burger

Is it though? Outside of personal bubbles, does anyone see impossible/beyond ‘meat’ being regularly consumed? It’s been relegated to a tiny shelf of my grocery store’s butcher shop, to the point that I can’t recall the last time I even saw it there.

I regularly consume impossible, and use it in pretty much any recipe that calls for ground beef.

Instead of pure "impossible", I take the middle road and enjoy "improbable" meat / meat substitute blend.

In Los Angeles it is still there, particularly at the fancy grocery stores. More visibly you see it on some restaurant menus.

I have lived through enough food trends in my life to suspect if something is popular in California it gets popular everywhere. I don't know if that will be Impossible, I mean just meat substitutes.

Also, I think this is one of those trends where people think the change will happen in 2-5 years but really its more like 10-20. There are a lot of good reasons for meat substitutes.

Here in Germany meat alternatives/substitutes have definitely reached a level of popularity that goes beyond a fad. The leading commercial producer of deli-meats has started producing vegetarian and vegan alternative products that now make up more than 60% of their annual revenue and they even dropped some of their original meat based products in favor of the plant-based alternatives.

It might not be the burger that's going to be replaced but sliced meats and other meat based products might be.

So the rich didn't turn it into a culture war there? Must be nice.

I wonder if the USA is unusually obsessive about meat and meat substitutes because, thanks to vast ranches and government subsidies, it has a steak culture. Even less prosperous Americans are used to looking at big red steaks at Walmart. They might believe, ignorant of how industrially cattle are raised, that this is real, honest-to-goodness meat as it should be. So, a meat substitute is a heinous opposite of that. Meanwhile, Europeans are used to eating meat (ground beef, chicken, pork) that is processed or less visibly impressive in some way, and a new twist on processed meat that has no actual meat isn’t so shocking.

Idk in large swaths of the country meat is sourced from local farmers. You can just buy a cow from a farmer and have it butchered. This is pretty common in america

Does that meat represent a substantial portion of the average meat consumed there? Some says the same here in Europe but still most go to the supermarket where most of the groceries aren't vegetarian, let alone vegan. I respectfully doubt there's places where people check the milk origin of their ice cream and never go to fast foods. It's great small local farmers and food-crafters exists with great quality outcome, but how do they compare in quantity with industrial meat, milk and eggs consumed in those large swaths?

My discounter supermarket has a vegan meat/cheese section a few meters wide. No one will bat an eye if you buy from it. It's pretty normalised.

Germany is very vegetarian-friendly.

I'm in a major city (>1 million pop) and with exception of the BBQ type places every eatery I've visited has had a passable meat imitation burger (or nuggets, etc) on offer.

Are you based in a more rural area? That might account for why the selection is small where you are.

It isn't commonplace at all. It's fairly uncommon to see it even offered, much less consumed.

I'd try it if i seen it, but i haven't seen it.

It's reliably available in any grocery store I've been into, and I don't particularly compare it to stuff from animals but it's pretty damn good on its own merits.

They sell it at Burger King. I get one fairly regularly (with respect to how often I go at all), because it's only like $1 more.

Starbucks, KFC, Chipotle as well. So like, pretty widespread "beyond (my) personal bubble", to answer GP's question.

I can get a big bag of Beyond Burgers at Costco, and that's in Tennessee

I have lots of thoughts about this. I never like to see the price of something increase, and the reasons for the increase in this case are not anything anyone wants. On the other hand, for me personally I feel like chocolate is far too prevalent, at least in the US, and if it led to more variety in desserts and candy I'd be happy.

Carob seems relevant to this? I know the associations from the 70s and 80s but I sort of feel like that was a marketing or framing problem rather than a taste problem. Substitute anything never goes over well.

I also feel like what's happening with cocoa and chocolate is representative of a lot of agricultural products today. Vanilla prices skyrocketed at some point in recent memory for similar reasons and haven't recovered, and there's similar tradeoffs involved there, with companies doing all sorts of things to offer alternatives to expensive pure natural vanilla or inexpensive artificial vanilla.

> Carob seems relevant to this? I know the associations from the 70s and 80s but I sort of feel like that was a marketing or framing problem rather than a taste problem

I don't think saying "it's just as good as chocolate" helped, but I never cared for the taste in general. Of course, I haven't tried it since I was a kid, so maybe someone has figured out what to do with it (or my tastes evolved) since.

I’ve stopped all consumption of chocolate after reading about the amount of lead in it.

This is the main reason I don't frequently eat chocolate anymore. Dark chocolate is both the tastiest and lowest-sugar chocolate, but its cacao-intensity increases your intake of metals.

If I recall correctly, however, the origin of the cacao makes some difference. Cacao from West Africa and Asia has a lot less lead and cadmium than from South America. Still, I think little chocolate, wherever it's from, is metal-free.

Related: I completely avoid any broth or stock made from chicken bones because it has way too much lead for me.

I claim to be able to feel the effects of the lead in the hours after I eat a meal containing chicken stock. I don't doubt your report about lead in chocolate, but I didn't feel the characteristic signs of my getting too much lead the last time I ate chocolate.

Lead and cadmium can stay in the body for decades, so it is a cumulative rather than an acute problem, I think.

It seems that eating one serving a day is fine. Everything has trace levels of metals. Rice has high arsenic but it doesn’t seem to affect the longevity of the Japanese. Here is a summary from one paper that tested lots of chocolate.

> This indicates that heavy metal contamination—in more than half of products tested—may not pose any appreciable risk for the average person when consumed as a single serving; however, consuming some of the products tested, or more than one serving per day in combination with non-cocoa derived sources heavy metals, may add up to exposure that would exceed the Prop 65 MADLs. Notably, “organic” products were significantly more likely to demonstrate higher levels of both Cd and Pb.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11321977/

The organic part is interesting and something most people probably don’t realize. I used to grow medical marijuana for a living and the people that failed their heavy metals testing were always growers that grew organic. The metals bioaccumulate and when you use manure or fish meal or whatever you are increasing the heavy metal content of your crop compared to using pure synthetic fertilizer, which has much lower trace metal contamination.

Cocoa flavanols are some of the most powerful compounds for heart and brain health. If you look around, you’ll find brands that actually test their cocoa for heavy metals. To get the most benefits, go for natural (undutched) cocoa, as, like the article mentions, the dutching process can strip away up to 80% of the good stuff.

From last month, an article in the Atlantic about how candy makers are experimenting with new non-chocolate ingredients and flavors in existing brands:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/10/chocolate-shortag... (gift link)

Leave it to the Dutch to industrially optimize all flavor out of food.

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