Imagine picking up a nice juicy apple – but instead of biting into it you keep the seeds and throw the rest away.
That’s what chocolate producers have traditionally done with the cocoa fruit – used the beans and disposed of the rest.
But now food scientists in Switzerland have come up with a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit rather than just the beans – and without using sugar.
The chocolate, developed at Zurich’s prestigious Federal Institute of Technology by scientist Kim Mishra and his team includes the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice, and the husk, or endocarp.
The process has already attracted the attention of sustainable food companies.
They say traditional chocolate production, using only the beans, involves leaving the rest of the cocoa fruit – the size of a pumpkin and full of nutritious value – to rot in the fields.
The key to the new chocolate lies in its very sweet juice, which tastes, Mr Mishra explains, “very fruity, a bit like pineapple”.