The Future of Chocolate
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| Collage by Linn Collette. For more, click here. |
Back in the Mayan age,
around 1100 BCE, cacao was recognized as a "super" food, traded as a
precious currency with a value on par with gold and jewels Bythe 17th century
the Spanish added sugar (cane) to sweeten it and the rest is history. As other
European countries clamored to get in on the action—and started exporting cacao
trees to their colonies—Africa soon became the world's most prominent grower of
cacao, even though it's not native to that continent.
Today, cacao has devolved into a byproduct of itself. Instead of being viewed as the sacred fruit that it is, with all its nutritional benefits, cacao is largely seen as a candy bar, a mid-day fix, loaded with sugar, milk, and other substandard ingredients.
"Most people think
of chocolate as a commodity and not a food," says Jim Eber, co-author of
Raising the Bar: The Future of Fine Chocolate. "And the reason goes beyond
process and back to a lack of connectivity between consumer and farmer and the
work that goes into producing a great bean before a manufacturer can even
produce great chocolate."
Yet, demand continues to
soar, in part because more and more unconventional markets (think China and
India) are joining the chocolate craze. Currently, the global chocolate
confectionary market is worth an astounding $102.3 billion, according to
Euromonitor International. In 2012, the head of the United Kingdom's Food and
Drink Federation estimated that in about seven years, we'll need another
million tons of cacao beans in order fulfill consumer desire—that's the
equivalent of another Ivory Coast, the world's largest cacao producer.
Supply just can't keep
up with demand for long. Companies like Mars, Hershey, and Nestle—and even the
International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), which "constantly follows and
analyzes" the world of cacao—have also expressed concern about the
sustainability of the cacao supply. Big Agriculture, climate change, crop
rotation, deforestation, cacao's susceptibility to disease, child labor, and
dollar signs are just some of the plagues attacking cacao. Still, there is hope
for this orphan crop.
Chocophiles, scientists,
and "Big Chocolate" believe that the chocolate center to this tootsie
pop of impending economic disaster is the sequencing of the cacao genome.