A team of scientists have reinvented the chocolate recipe, swapping a part of the refined sugar for a part of the cocoa fruit that is usually thrown away.
Experts believe that the novel chocolate-making method discovered by scientists from ETH Zürich in Switzerland could lead to more sustainable and healthier chocolate.
As reported in Nature Food, scientists have made a sweet and fibrous gel that could replace the sugar in chocolate, by mashing up the pulp and husk of a cocoa pod instead of just using the beans.
Kim Mishra, a food technologist at ETH Zürich and lead author of the study, said: “The cocoa fruit is basically a pumpkin and right now we’re just using the seeds. But there’s a lot of other marvellous stuff in that fruit.”
The researchers found that the resulting chocolate contained more grams of fibre than conventional 100-gram blocks.
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It also provided the equivalent sweetness without the same load of sugar, researchers said.
The research discovered that the product that was 20% ‘whole fruit gel’ was as sweet as chocolate that was traditionally made from around 5 to 10% powdered sugar.
The research also found that the method used 6% less land and water but, increased planet-heating emissions by 12%.
According to the Guardian, Alejandro Marangoni, from the Department of food science at the University of Guelph in Canada, said the study was a “fairly comprehensive” proposal that now needs to be validated with a pilot.
Earlier this year, Waitrose became the first UK retailer to join an initiative to help chocolate brands or companies which sell cocoa products have more sustainable supply chains.
