Chocolate on the chopping block

It’s no secret that chocolate, like so many food items, has been getting increasingly expensive. Cocoa plants are highly susceptible to the effects of climate change. Add to that labor issues, tariffs, and an infection carried by mealybugs, and you have a crisis. Manufacturers have to pivot as the cost of their key ingredient continues to rise. Some companies have taken the drastic step of removing cocoa and cocoa butter from some of their products.

Sometimes this reduction will force the companies to change the label on their products (in the US) because the FDA regulates what can be called chocolate. Other countries have similar (often more stringent) labeling restrictions. Here, companies who don’t use cocoa cannot call their product “chocolate”, but they can use the terms “chocolate flavor,” “chocolate taste” or “chocolatey.” Unless you are carefully reading the package, it could be easy to miss this shift.

Your tastebuds, however, would detect the change – or would they? Researchers say they have developed a product that tastes just like chocolate that does not require any cocoa products. Hosts from the Today Show conducted a side-by-side taste test of these fake chocolates. All of them could tell the difference, but stated that if they had not been tasting both products at the same time they might not have noticed. I would love to see the results of a blind taste test.

When I volunteered at a food co-op during college, I was introduced to carob, which many of the co-op’s customers used instead of cocoa because of ethical or dietary considerations. At that time, carob wasn’t going to fool anyone, even if it did make a passable brownie. I am sure that in the ensuing years much progress has been made in the development of chocolate alternatives. I am not convinced that I will be fooled by an imitation, even a high-quality one, but I am willing to be proven wrong. A world without chocolate is not one I want to contemplate, and it sounds like we are getting closer to finding adequate alternatives.