Swiss scientists invent a new type of chocolate

If you’re a bit bored by the regular chocolate varieties in your grocery store, Swiss scientists have invented a brand new kind of chocolate made of “cocoa fruit jelly.” The new concoction uses more of the cocoa fruit, making it healthier and more sustainable.

Usually, chocolate is made of cocoa beans, mixed with a little bit of the pulp that holds them in the center of the fruit. This cocoa mass is then combined with sugar, milk powder and other ingredients, depending on how dark the chocolate is. But of course, pouring in bags of sugar means chocolate isn’t a particularly healthy snack, and there are environmental and economic issues that mean we might be headed for a global chocolate shortage.

A new chocolate recipe from researchers at ETH Zurich could potentially tackle those problems. The key is to use more materials from the cocoa pod that are usually discarded, including more of the pulp as well as the inner lining of the husk, known as the endocarp. This is mixed together to make what they call “cocoa jelly,” which is so extremely sweet it can replace the powdered sugar in most chocolate recipes.

Finding the right concentrations took a lot of trial and error. Too much cocoa jelly made chocolate that was clumpy, but too little meant it wasn’t sweet enough. Eventually, the team settled on a formulation that can contain up to 20% cocoa jelly, which had a sweetness profile similar to that of existing dark chocolate, according to blind taste tests were conducted with a panel of trained experts.

The resulting chocolate also had 20% more fiber and 30% less saturated fat than average European dark chocolate. That could end up making for chocolate that’s less of a guilty pleasure – especially since it could help cocoa farmers earn more from their crops.

“This means that farmers can not only sell the beans, but also dry out the juice from the pulp and the endocarp, grind it into powder and sell that as well,” said Kim Mishra, main author of the study. “This would allow them to generate income from three value-creation streams. And more value creation for the cocoa fruit makes it more sustainable.”

Before cocoa fruit jelly chocolate makes its way to supermarket shelves though, infrastructure changes are needed. Cocoa farmers, for instance, will need equipment to dry out the materials to make the jelly, and chocolate producers then need to be able to incorporate it into their workflows.

Still, it’s intriguing to see new ways that everybody’s favorite treat could be improved.

The research was published in the journal Nature Food.

Source: ETH Zurich