Premium Chocolate

Premium chocolate growers are going to save the chocolate’s essence production in the next decades

Answering: How is the future of chocolate in the next decades going to be and which would be the solution of the increasingly loss of chocolate’s essence?

Chocolate has been appreciated for many centuries as a luxury and a pleasure. For the ancient maya, cacao represented the god’s nourishment. In the XIX century Cuban people used it as an aphrodisiac and even in the XX, the culinary expert Fannie Farmer recommend it for its effect in case of bad digestion. As it is possible to see, cacao the principal ingredient of chocolate, has taken a really important place in human history, even today, the consumption of chocolate has been increasing significantly. Just in Valentine’s Day 700 million dollar are spent in chocolate in The United States. In the whole world, annually it is disbursed over 90,000 million in order to purchase chocolate and the demand increasing because the growth of population, it is possible that the supply of cacao could be depleted in the coming future. However, the future of chocolate has become a responsibility to premium chocolate producers because as the big chocolate industries are worried more in profits than sell a high quality chocolate, the meaning of chocolate production will lose its priority because for the industries would be better to short costs rather than invest in quality.

First of all, it is important to understand the supply of cacao in the future. Today, the demand of chocolate is rising and for example, in growing economies (like in India, Brasil and China) consumption is growing in a faster rate than production. It is estimated that if the rate of consumption increased in 2% per year by the 2020 it will be necessary an equivalent of million tons of cocoa beans and that’s equivalent to another cote d’voire . This is a big problem because this would affect the commodities market because the global stocks could decline making a period of low and falling prices that would reduce farmers’ incomes, and they would respond by reducing inputs, which could be reflected in lower yields as husbandry standards declined. Cocoa farmers would be unable to counter the increasing losses in yields from the spread of pests and diseases (Black Pod in most regions, especially Africa; Witches’ Broom in the Americas; and Cocoa Pod Borer in Asia) because of insufficient resources , and that would affect not only the quality of the beans, but it would generate a decrease in the production of useful cacao to make chocolate.

A cycle would be created, because as the farmers would lose a part of their cultivation, the offer would decrease making prices higher and the big companies that seek to sell poor quality and low cost chocolate would stop buying big amounts of cacao in order to look for other cheap ingredients to make “chocolate” bars. This industrial behavior is not recent, the processing technology has been improved substantially both in terms of efficiency and diversity by adding milk powder (resulting in milk chocolate), emulsifiers, and other ingredients such as nuts, fruit, etc. In some countries various types of cocoa butter substitutes are added, reducing the cost of raw materials and improving certain quality aspects of the final product such as breakability, gloss, melting point, shelf-time, etc. Operating in a highly competitive market, many chocolate manufacturers reduced the cocoa content in their chocolate products to ease the impact of increasing costs of the raw cocoa material in their products and/or reduced the size of their chocolate products. For example, in the EU, up to 5% of the cocoa butter can be substituted with cheaper vegetable fats including palm oil, karate, illipe, sal, kokum and mango-kernel oil. Hence it is estimated that cocoa consumption shrank even more than chocolate consumption . This can show how the principal ingredient of chocolate is being reduce and with it, the real essence of chocolate, creating more a consumption of chocolate candy rather than a real bar of chocolate. If this continues in this way, the chocolate would not longer exist, because the farmers will get less motivated to cultivate cacao beans and the offer will decrease, creating this horrible cycle that would affect the future of cacao’s production.

As we can see, the problems that are being created are principle based on how the big companies want to low costs by adding different components to chocolate rather than a high quality cacao, buying less quantity of cacao demotivating the farmers making them stop investing on their cultivations. However, not everything would be lost, because there are some small companies that could save the future of cacao’s production. Besides the transnational companies and large, primarily nationally-based chocolate companies, there are other segments in the industry, namely small companies producing `ethical' chocolate or high quality products for luxury niche markets. The latter group is characterized by

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