Making Chocolate More Planet Friendly While Adding Less Sugar

What’s not to like about this? Swiss food scientists have devised a process for making chocolate that is more planet friendly and requires less added sugar.

If you ever felt guilt about enjoying a little bit of chocolate, let it go.

Less Waste

The main thing here is crop waste. Typically, most of the cocoa fruit is wasted during harvest. Only the beans from the center of the fruit go into making chocolate while the rest of the pods go to waste. In Nature Food, Kim Mishra and colleagues describe a process for making chocolate while using more of the cocoa fruit. They propose using often-wasted parts of the cocoa pod to make something that can serve to sweeten the chocolate and reduce the need to add sugar from other sources. Mishra says:

“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.

“This would allow them to generate income from three value-​creation streams. And more value creation for the cocoa fruit makes it more sustainable.”

Better Nutrition Profile

This sounds like a win-win scenario because Mishra et al also claim that using the cocoa pods yields chocolate with a better nutrition profile. They write:

“It also has comparable sweet taste as traditional chocolate while offering improved nutritional value with higher fibre and reduced saturated fatty acid content. A cradle-to-factory life cycle assessment shows that large-scale production of this chocolate could reduce land use and global warming potential compared with average European dark chocolate production.

Honestly, we already feel okay about enjoying a little chocolate – especially the darker varieties. But if it can be produced with less impact on the planet and more value for the farmers, count us in.

Click here for the paper by Mishra et al, here, here, and here for further perspective.

Chocolate Pudding, photograph by Ted Kyle / Conscienhealth

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September 5, 2024