The New chocolate - a revolution
An industrial age

As chocolate consumption grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as technical advances introduced solid chocolate as a palatable and desirable confection, chocolate became a mass-market product. Manufacturers invented chocolate confections that are still mass sellers today as they sought to create standardised products, while keeping their recipes secret. The result was a public and a trade no longer connected with or interested in the origin of the chocolate they were eating.

Chocolate became just chocolate and the quality of beans used went down as quantity became more important. Inferior, over-roasted and often unfermented beans were used in increasing quantities. As milk chocolate became popular after Henri Peters discovered how to successfully combine Nestlé’s milk powder with chocolate mass, the consuming public came to forget the real taste of chocolate. The end result is that for many consumers the term ‘chocolate’ has become a euphemism for any candy bar containing some small percentage of cocoa in the coating.

The further demise of Criollo

While the market for chocolate was becoming both industrialised and homogenised as the 20th century progressed, a variety of Forestero – amelanado – originally found along the lower Amazon, was planted around the equator, in Africa, South East Asia, India, the Caribbean and South American countries like Brazil.

This second wave of Forestero pushed the finer varieties into even less use, so that now Forestero dominates and the superior Criollo varieties cling on in locations around the world where it originally grew, or where it had been planted before later being superceded by Forestero - in patches in Central America, and in larger amounts in Venezuela, still known for some of the best cocoa in the world.

As Forestero was taken around the world and grown in large plantations, it turned out not to be as hardy as was hoped. New environments brought new diseases and the large estates planted by the colonists gradually declined leaving mostly peasant smallholdings.

Food scientists, disease and flavour

In the early 20th century the new discipline of industrial food science was applied to these withering crops. Research centres were set-up and cloning techniques developed. Decades of research were devoted to finding new, high yield disease resistant strains of Theobroma Cacao. Hybrids were produced from Upper Amazon strains and planted around the world, reducing the proportion of Criollo even further.

The last thing on the mind of the research stations and their government and corporate sponsors was flavour, and as the genetic base of commercial cocoa narrowed even further, the new breeds turned out to be susceptible not only to the old diseases and problems, but also some new ones! For example the Brazilian cocoa trade has been almost wiped out in recent decades, and the continuous rise in the price of cocoa on the world market reflects the worldwide problems in modern production.

  low bean yield in Brazil

 

This all makes the future of chocolate sound grim, and indeed there are many problems and challenges ahead, but we are also in a unique time where there is hope of recovering and rediscovering the lost flavours and variations of real chocolate.

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