The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all | Hacker News Reader

The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all

swissinfo.ch

Carob based chocolate alternatives, like discussed in the article, are already on the market (have been since the 70s!) and they don't taste very good, so they're generally relegated to diet food from health food stores.

Carob based "chocolate" is good for dog treats, but I don't see humans getting excited about it any time soon.

Go buy some from Whole Foods if you don't believe me.

It’s better than eating lead and cadmium at least.

(For those unaware, almost all popular brands of chocolate are contaminated with lead and cadmium)

but lead tastes yummy :(

It was used as a sweetener at one time…

Look what Ancient Rome accomplished with lead pipes

All plant products are contaminated to one degree or another with unhealthy things the plants pulled out of the soil.

Ehh just load up on cilantro, it's a natural chelator!

I actually like the taste of carob. But it is significantly different from the taste of chocolate.

The variation in taste is so weird and complicated that we use "a matter of taste" as a generic idiom.

While it may very well be true that alternative ingredients will play a role they could also just follow the regulations and not destroy forests to grow cocoa beans. Self-obliged regulation like fair trade has been a thing for decades now, chocosuisse will just have to live with some cuts to their profit margins and do some additional work.

Their alternative is no profit at all (those alternatives are not ready, according to the article), so the idea that they will just refuse to produce anything is pure propaganda.

They aren't going to sacrifice profit. They are going to raise prices.

But yes, the refusal to produce anything is pure propaganda.

With Germany in recession and being such a big market for them, and the price consciousness of German consumers, they can't raise prices all that much I'd assume. We'll see. But you are right, they will certainly try.

The difference between what cocoa farmers get paid vs what chocolate companies make selling their product is so enormous that I find this article incredibly offensive. But the chocolate industry has a very long history of this kind of shameless exploitation.

Is this true of farming in general? How much does the cost of a loaf of bread compare to price paid to the farmer for the wheat?

Always has been. Middlemen eat most of the margin. A bushel of wheat is cheaper than a fancy loaf of bread.

I just learned the trivia that for milk in Germany the ratio was around 30% going to farmers which seemed surprisingly good

To be fair, milk doesn't undergo that much treatment compared to bread or chocolate.

traditional cocoa-based chocolate will likely remain the majority of the market. There already exists chocolate alternatives such as carob bean and we see how well that does in the market. The significant price of cocoa will incentivize automation even further. Maybe they'll find a way to expand its growing range.

We have kind of already moved where it grows, it's indigenous to south America but most of it is grown in Africa. My assumption is that we'd see indoor / vertical farms for many temperamental plants if it becomes more cost effective, but that might be impossible for cacao which is a tree. Or perhaps someone will find a way to cross breed it with something that will help it grow elsewhere.

I've already seen cookies in the store that are praised as containing an "oat based chocolate alternative", as if replacing cocoa was something anyone asked for.

That led me down a rabbit hole of food substitutes in the German Democratic Republic. They didn't have the resources of the west so they started replacing all kind of ingredients. This went as far as putting fish meal into chocolate.

> oat based chocolate alternative

Are you sure the oat is replacing cocoa in the chocolate and not milk?

"Just entirely without cocoa beans, but with oats and/ or sunflower seeds"

https://choviva.com/details

Producing chocolate is so incredibly inefficient that the only reason we have it is because of economic level differentials across countries.

Fascinating observation from my perspective as someone who has not studied economics. But I assume that is also true of saffron, truffles, wooden pencils -- and maybe even smart phones?

Well relatively, I meant. For example, consider bananas. You can produce quite a lot of good bananas from one banana tree with relatively little work, but to produce a chocolate bar need an energy and water-intensive process and quite a lot of cacau pods.

Is is sobering to think that so many of our pleasures in life depend on other people either doing an unpleasant job or doing something for which they are paid very little.

Most cheap foods with chocolate already have little cocoa in it. The essence of chocolate is made up of three parts, a sweetener like sugar, an oil with a high melting point, and cocoa oil has one of the highest melting points out of plant oils, but is often mixed with cheaper oils like palm oil or coconut oil, which have a much higher melting point than most oils, but still not as high as that of cocoa oil. And the third part is the cocoa solids. As far as I know cocoa beans are both fermented and roasted. I think there are other plants suitable for making something similar to chocolate, turns out mango seed oil has a melting point similar to that of cocoa oil.

I could see cheap chocolate bars using a substitute that doesn't come from actual cocoa beans. But I don't think that would be possible for higher quality single-source chocolate where you get subtle flavors that depend on the soil the tree grew in.

Carob is awesome! I like it much better than chocolate.

But, it's not chocolate, and food made with carob is not chocolate, it's carob.

Is there some overall reason to call things something they are not?

Is this another form of meme illiteracy?

Have Swiss scientists made a chocolate breakthrough?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41366910

The future might just be to remove the regulations again and enjoy cheap chocolate. What other countries do with their trees is not my problem.

This has been my standpoint though I'm not against regulation. Am I expected to vet every supply chain for everything that I buy? Sounds ridiculous. Let other countries and regulators worry about it.

Should companies competing in your economy be allowed to profit off cheap / illegal labor? That kind of labor makes labor in your economy uncompetitive

> What other countries do with their trees is not my problem.

You may mean that what you don't want to worry about it, which is a reasonable position as you can't worry about everything, but it certainly is your problem in the sense that it affects you; it's not like the effects of deforestation respect national borders.

The effects of deforestation most certainly are contained locally

That sounds like claiming the effect of scarring on the lungs is local to the scarred area and has no other effect on the body at all.

It's also contrary to the statements made by NASA in their studies and monitoring of deforestation about the world.

Net loss of forest is net loss of carbon capture by forests.

Is there no balance we can strive to hit?

Seems weird to be ok with slave labour and poor practices, simply because you want to ignore the negative externalities and consume cheap things (ie. undermining local economic production).

You will live in a pod and eat fava-bean-based "chocolate". You will own nothing and you will like it

The world of Wall-e is not too far away

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