And that's not all. For the first time, the entire cocoa fruit is used in this new process.
Until now, most of the fruit has been thrown away in the chocolate making process. It was a bit like picking up a lovely ripe apple but, instead of biting into it, you keep the seeds and throw the rest away. That's what chocolate producers have traditionally done with the cocoa fruit - used the beans and discarded the rest.
But now food scientists in Switzerland have come up with a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit rather than just the beans - and without using sugar.
The chocolate, developed at Zurich’s prestigious Federal Institute of Technology by scientist Kim Mishra and his team includes the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice, and the husk. No wonder this innovation is already attracting the attention of sustainable food companies.
They say traditional chocolate production, using only the beans, involves leaving the rest of the cocoa fruit - the size of a pumpkin and full of nutritious value - to rot in the fields.
The key to the new chocolate lies in its very sweet juice, which tastes, Mr Mishra explains, "very fruity, a bit like pineapple". This juice, which is 14 percent sugar, is distilled down to form a highly concentrated syrup, combined with the pulp and then, taking sustainability to new levels, mixed with the dried husk, or endocarp, to form a very sweet cocoa gel.
The gel, when added to the cocoa beans to make chocolate, eliminates the need for sugar.
Mr Mishra sees his invention as the latest in a long line of innovations by Swiss chocolate producers.
In Switzerland, some of the bigger producers - including Lindt - are starting to use the cocoa fruit as well as the beans, but none, so far, has taken the step of eliminating sugar completely.
"We have to find daring chocolate producers who want to test the market and are willing to contribute to a more sustainable chocolate," says Mr Mishra. "Then we can disrupt the system."
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