Swiss scientists have discovered a way to improve the world's favourite indulgence, making it better for consumers and growers. How? By concocting a "cocoa fruit jelly".
Usually, chocolate is made of cocoa beans, mixed with a little bit of the pulp that holds them in the centre of the fruit. This is then combined with sugar, milk powder and other ingredients, depending on how dark the chocolate is. But pouring bags of sugar into the mix means chocolate isn’t a particularly healthy snack.
The new chocolate recipe from researchers at ETH Zurich uses 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 deliciously sweet that there's no need to add all that powdered sugar into most chocolate recipes.
The resulting chocolate also had 20% more fibre and 30 percent less saturated fat than average European dark chocolate. That could end up making for chocolate that’s less of a guilty pleasure and, better yet, it could enable 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.”