Swiss Scientists Made a Healthier and More Sustainable Chocolate

If there’s one group of people you can trust to know their stuff about chocolate, it’s the Swiss.

Recently, a group of Swiss scientists from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), a public university renowned for producing some 32 Nobel winners, discovered a way make chocolate more sustainable and healthier. And don’t worry. It’s just as delicious. 

In a new report published in the May issue of Nature Food, the group of scientists detailed how they took the process of making chocolate back to the drawing board to create a more nutritional treat using pieces of the cocoa plant that are typically discarded during production. 

According to the paper, the team developed a method of “repurposing the often-discarded pectin-rich cocoa pod endocarp,” converting it into a gel by using the “cocoa pulp juice concentrate to replace traditional sugar from sugar beets.” This, in turn, led to a chocolate that has a higher fiber content than the average European dark chocolate (15 grams vs. 12 grams) and less saturated fat (23 grams vs. 33 grams).​​ And it’s all thanks to the added fiber. 

“Fiber is valuable from a physiological perspective because it naturally regulates intestinal activity and prevents blood sugar levels from rising too rapidly when consuming chocolate,”  Kim Mishra, the lead author of the study, shared with the ETH Zurich website. “Saturated fat can also pose a health risk when too much is consumed. There’s a relationship between increased consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.”

But, perhaps most importantly to sweet tooths out there, the team added in its study that its new chocolate, “also has comparable sweet taste as traditional chocolate.” It made sure of this by asking trained panelists from the Bern University of Applied Sciences to taste-test pieces of the chocolate with various amounts of powdered sugar vs. the gel to ensure it’s close. “This allowed us to empirically determine the sweetness of our recipe as expressed in the equivalent amount of powdered sugar,” Mishra added.  

Moreover, the team conducted a life cycle analysis for chocolate, which showed that if this form of chocolate were to go to large-scale production, it could reduce land use and have major climate impacts compared to the production of classic dark chocolate. An important metric when you consider just how high carbon emissions are for chocolate production.   

And while this all sounds like a great thing, it may be a while until you actually see the product at grocery stores. Mishra explained that it would take overhauling an entire industry, starting with cocoa farmers, to make the change. However, they have taken the first step by filing a patent for their cocoa-fruit chocolate recipe, which means there’s still hope for your future dessert yet.