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For those who don't want to read, they distill the cacao juice, mix it with the pureed husk, and then use that instead of sugar in the chocolate. The process is

For those who don't want to read, they distill the cacao juice, mix it with the pureed husk, and then use that instead of sugar in the chocolate. The process is more expensive than using sugar itself, which is the cheapest part of chocolate production. Then there's some romantic pontificating that this will somehow alleviate West Africa from modern day colonialism/child slavery or lower the price of chocolate. So no, Swiss scientists have not made a chocolate breakthrough. Buy your chocolate from companies that don't use child slavery, even if it's more expensive.

LtWorf 2y ago
> Buy your chocolate from companies that don't use child slavery, even if it's more expensive. What if they use child slavery but pretend not to and just charge more? Plenty of those cases got revealed.
yunwal 2y ago
Just curious, what are those companies? Is fair trade a good indicator or just marketing?
- xnx 2y ago
  There may be others, but this brand has made it their focus: https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/our-mission https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/our-mission
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Yeah but the question is where's the proof that they actually put that into practice. Because all large corporations are full of ESG and greenwashing messages on their websites but we all know the reality is different. Missions statements are cheap.
    - Vinnl 2y ago
      Tony's Chocolonely is an interesting brand, because its origin lies in a Dutch TV show investigating consumer goods. At some point, the presenter ("Tony" [1]) decided to sue himself for buying slave chocolate, and then decided to see how hard it actually is to make slave-free chocolate - and Tony's Chocolonely was born. As I understand it they're less strictly idealistic than they used to be so as to be a profitable business, but at least it wasn't an attempt at fairwashing an existing brand. [1] Actually Teun (van de Keuken), but that doesn't work well in English.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >van de Keuken Ha, Neuken in de Keuken, is the only Dutch I know.
        Vinnl 2y ago
        Turns out that "in the kitchen" (or "of the kitchen", in this case) is actually regular vernacular as well :)
    - _a_a_a_ 2y ago
      What kind of proof would you want?
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        Something more than "trust me bro". Something like a third party auditor confirming their claims.
    - xnx 2y ago
      Very reasonable to be skeptical of these kind of things, but this company seems to be the real deal: https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/annual-fair-reports https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/annual-fair-reports
  - systemtest 2y ago
    Their original slogan was "100 percent slave free" and they changed it to "towards 100 percent slave free" a while back. Nowadays their slogan is "Crazy about chocolate. Serious about people". They seem to constantly weaken their slogan.
- mkesper 2y ago
  Have a look here, table should be understandable without knowing german: https://makechocolatefair.org/nachhaltigkeitssiegel-fuer-schokolade-im-vergleich https://makechocolatefair.org/nachhaltigkeitssiegel-fuer-sch... As suspected, UTZ guarantees are weakest by far.
  - gs17 2y ago
    > table should be understandable without knowing german The "Ja" and "Nein" parts are, but I don't think, for example, "Rückverfolgbarkeit" is understandable without knowing German (having to know "UTZ" means "Rainforest Alliance" is a different issue).
nervousvarun 2y ago
Know this article was concerned with fair labor, but heavy metals are also a concern with chocolate (at least for North America). https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/heavy-metals-found-in-popular-brands-of-dark-chocolate https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/heavy-metals-fou...
- XzetaU8 2y ago
  Indeed, heavy metals in chocolate is a real issue a more recent CR test here: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/a-third-of-chocolate-products-are-high-in-heavy-metals-a4844566398 https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/a-third-o... and one from Bryan Johnson (anti-aging tech millionaire): https://youtu.be/RzWWOQMLttE https://youtu.be/RzWWOQMLttE
  - tomComb 2y ago
    I'm a fan of CR and of independent testing. I'm sorry that the attempts to bring independent testing to the supplements industry haven't done better. But they too fall victim to the need to exaggerate every story to get better headlines. In this case, they came up with ridiculously stringent standards allowing them to suggest danger where there isn't. On the other hand, it is good that the outliers get scolded and hopefully they improve their processes as a result.
Rinzler89 2y ago
>Buy your chocolate from companies that don't use child slavery, even if it's more expensive. Which are those? Because most of those "made from Fairtrade/ethically sourced cocoa" labels you see on most chocolate bars are worth exactly dogshit.
- Moru 2y ago
  This one is a serious one [0]. It's a small local chocolate producer that has close contacts with other small cacao producers and buys directly from them. [0] https://nordicchocolate.se/chokladbutik/ https://nordicchocolate.se/chokladbutik/ Oh, and the flavour and texture is great. Lindt has nothing on these ones :-)
  - jefftk 2y ago
    How do you know their practices are better than at your typical artisanal chocolate company? The kind of claims they're making don't look unusual to me.
    - Moru 2y ago
      Not sure what you mean with artisanal, english is not my native tongue. But she is a local legend here. Been passionate about chocolate since a kid and has worked hard to build a supply chain that works to her standards. Was on the news a few times showing the local sources of her cacao. And after tasting the chocolate I believe everything she says. :-)
okr 2y ago
Just curious, how to identify the companies, that use child slavery? Is there a logo on the packaging? How does it look like?
- Vinnl 2y ago
  It's fairly hard to do, but the ones that make an effort will generally at least have the Fair Trade logo. (UTZ is an weak industry-initiated alternative that does not cut it, as I understand it.)
- not_math 2y ago
  There's a John Oliver episode about the chocolate industry, you can check it out on YouTube. Of course there's no logo saying the chocolate is made with child slavery, I hope you didn't mean to be snarky here. There are initiatives to try to alleviate the problem, the only example I have in mind right now is Tony's Chocolonely (which explains the problem and their solution on their website) but I'm sure others could come up with other initiatives. The trends from top companies of chocolate is that they try to do as little as possible to alleviate the problem of child slavery in chocolate production.
  - Biganon 2y ago
    > Of course there's no logo saying the chocolate is made with child slavery, I hope you didn't mean to be snarky here. ...? Quality labels are a thing, why couldn't an independent NGO overwatch the production?
    - cogman10 2y ago
      It's expensive, easy to bypass, and has little enforcement teeth. Expensive because you need to pay an inspector (ideally multiple to avoid corruption) to visit these farms. Easy to bypass because the kids aren't working the fields all the time and there's plenty of warning an inspector is coming. And the enforcement mechanism is you don't get the label... But like there's plenty of buyers for slave chocolate so that mostly means a minor hit on income. NGO inspectors are better than nothing, but we should be clear eyed in how much they can solve. The only way to significantly reduce slave labor is harsh penalties on companies that trade in slave goods. That was pretty much the only thing that collapsed the ivory market.
Lendal 2y ago
You left out why sugar is the cheapest part. Subsidies.
- sophiacamille 2y ago
  Isn't sugar just relatively cheap to produce and can be locally grown in Europe?
  - WorldMaker 2y ago
    One of the biggest sources of the world's sugar today is corn (as High Fructose Corn Syrup), which is a rather expensive "concentration" process but is heavily subsidized in the United States by a large number of interlocking subsidies in US's strange, complex multi-grade corn system which leads to "cheap" access of lots of "waste" corn that that is "cheap as free" enough that the expensive "concentration" efforts are still profitable at cheap costs. One of the "best" sources of "plain" white sucrose (versus fruit's heavier balance of fructose) is sugar cane, which is a plant that prefers sub-tropical regions and often islands at that and historically required massive plantations with slave labor to get cheap and today involve massive expensive industrial harvesters and international cooperation of subsidies, grants, and colonial legacies. Maple trees grow in northern climates and real Maple syrups are expensive today as a number of subsidies expired and demand outpaced production and even available supply. Other fruit syrups compete against the primary uses of their fruits.
    - snovv_crash 2y ago
      To add: in Europe there is a large percentage of sugar coming from beets, which wouldn't be used for food otherwise.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      Why write such a long comment about USA agriculture in reply to someone speaking about european agriculture?
      - 2y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> or lower the price of chocolate. In the US, I can't even really buy chocolate anymore. About 3 or 4 years ago, it suddenly changed flavor... now it tastes like brown-colored wax to me. It was sudden and noticeable, and if I looked through old posts I could narrow it down to a particular month. This was across the board for all things Nestle and Hershey. Maybe if I got some snobby Eurochocolate, but I wouldn't know where. And sometimes I just like (or want to like) the candy bars I'd get as a kid. It's not the only food that's undergone one of these "now with 10% less sawdust" scenarios, Kraft mac'n'cheese comes to mind.
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  Did you try whole foods? Thats where my hippy parents get their chocolate and I mean that in a positive way.
- 1986 2y ago
  Changed suddenly 3-4 years ago... long COVID?
- freeone3000 2y ago
  Did you happen to get infected with COVID-19 during that period?
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  It’s not snobby to buy food that isn’t produced by the largest, most evil food corps in the world. It has relatively little to do with Europe either. Go for Tony’s imo.
- Maken 2y ago
  3-4 years ago was the COVID epidemic. Are you sure you are not suffering loss of smell?
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    That seems about 1 trillion times more likely than that all of the chocolate sold here (made by many disparate producers) suddenly changed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
WorldMaker 2y ago
I don't think it is necessarily "romantic pontificating". They've effectively found (or more likely "refound" given there were probably indigenous recipes like this for centuries) that you can "cider" the chocolate fruit and like apple cidering the most effective (industrial) application of this process will be close to the source of the fruit rather than at an industrial junction of commerce such as Switzerland with access to shipments of both cheap industrial sugar and expensively labored cocoa beans. Even if the cocoa fruit sugars are more expensive in the markets of Switzerland than other sugars, the cheapest source of sugar at the cocoa plantation itself is still going to be the "leftover"/"waste" fruit. If the recipe these Swiss scientists have come up with is good enough, producers could start to build "whole chocolate" directly near the plantations and better compete in that market directly rather than in the cocoa bean "ingredient" market. That would lower the price of chocolate (more suppliers, shorter supply chains with fewer middlemen). If there's "romantic pontification" in the article it's as much or more the multiple reassurances that Swiss chocolate would remain relevantly competitive (and not just an expensive reminder of a bygone era) to such a massive increase of suppliers with access to existing "waste" products, should it happen. ETA: And/or such a process might open up a much larger market for shipping the whole fruit, not just the beans, and moving the expensive labor parts closer to the industrial hubs. That would also obviously alleviate labor problems at the edges (plantations), incentivize reducing/eliminating labor with industrial tools that wasn't as incentivized before, and might also bring production costs down overall (for cheaper, more sustainable chocolate).
- Majromax 2y ago
  > Even if the cocoa fruit sugars are more expensive in the markets of Switzerland than other sugars, the cheapest source of sugar at the cocoa plantation itself is still going to be the "leftover"/"waste" fruit. Not necessarily. Chocolate abhors moisture, so sugars derived from the fruit and pulp will need to be extensively dehydrated. Over some range of energy and capital costs versus refined sugar cost, it may still be more expensive to have "whole fruit" processing on-site than to import refined sugar for processing. > If the recipe these Swiss scientists have come up with is good enough, producers could start to build "whole chocolate" directly near the plantations and better compete in that market directly rather than in the cocoa bean "ingredient" market. Is the expense of sugar really what makes the rest of the production chain (roasting, grinding, and final processing) infeasible on-site? > And/or such a process might open up a much larger market for shipping the whole fruit, not just the beans, and moving the expensive labor parts closer to the industrial hubs. If you're contemplating shipping the whole fruit without processing, I think this would still be infeasible. The fruit is wet, which would vastly increase the shipping cost per kilogram of final chocolate. Shipping the raw fruit might also require a cold chain, depending on how likely it is to ferment or spoil en-route. You can analogize this to bulk shipments of sugar, where as I understand it early-stage milling is done near the sugar cane/beet plantations to remove most of the moisture. The raw cane sugar is largely dry, and it can be cost-effectively transported to sugar refineries for further processing.

LtWorf 2y ago

> Buy your chocolate from companies that don't use child slavery, even if it's more expensive. What if they use child slavery but pretend not to and just charge more? Plenty of those cases got revealed.

yunwal 2y ago

Just curious, what are those companies? Is fair trade a good indicator or just marketing?

xnx 2y ago
There may be others, but this brand has made it their focus: https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/our-mission https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/our-mission
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Yeah but the question is where's the proof that they actually put that into practice. Because all large corporations are full of ESG and greenwashing messages on their websites but we all know the reality is different. Missions statements are cheap.
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    Tony's Chocolonely is an interesting brand, because its origin lies in a Dutch TV show investigating consumer goods. At some point, the presenter ("Tony" [1]) decided to sue himself for buying slave chocolate, and then decided to see how hard it actually is to make slave-free chocolate - and Tony's Chocolonely was born. As I understand it they're less strictly idealistic than they used to be so as to be a profitable business, but at least it wasn't an attempt at fairwashing an existing brand. [1] Actually Teun (van de Keuken), but that doesn't work well in English.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >van de Keuken Ha, Neuken in de Keuken, is the only Dutch I know.
      - Vinnl 2y ago
        Turns out that "in the kitchen" (or "of the kitchen", in this case) is actually regular vernacular as well :)
  - _a_a_a_ 2y ago
    What kind of proof would you want?
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      Something more than "trust me bro". Something like a third party auditor confirming their claims.
  - xnx 2y ago
    Very reasonable to be skeptical of these kind of things, but this company seems to be the real deal: https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/annual-fair-reports https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en/annual-fair-reports
- systemtest 2y ago
  Their original slogan was "100 percent slave free" and they changed it to "towards 100 percent slave free" a while back. Nowadays their slogan is "Crazy about chocolate. Serious about people". They seem to constantly weaken their slogan.
mkesper 2y ago
Have a look here, table should be understandable without knowing german: https://makechocolatefair.org/nachhaltigkeitssiegel-fuer-schokolade-im-vergleich https://makechocolatefair.org/nachhaltigkeitssiegel-fuer-sch... As suspected, UTZ guarantees are weakest by far.
- gs17 2y ago
  > table should be understandable without knowing german The "Ja" and "Nein" parts are, but I don't think, for example, "Rückverfolgbarkeit" is understandable without knowing German (having to know "UTZ" means "Rainforest Alliance" is a different issue).

nervousvarun 2y ago

Know this article was concerned with fair labor, but heavy metals are also a concern with chocolate (at least for North America). https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/heavy-metals-found-in-popular-brands-of-dark-chocolate https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/heavy-metals-fou...

XzetaU8 2y ago
Indeed, heavy metals in chocolate is a real issue a more recent CR test here: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/a-third-of-chocolate-products-are-high-in-heavy-metals-a4844566398 https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/a-third-o... and one from Bryan Johnson (anti-aging tech millionaire): https://youtu.be/RzWWOQMLttE https://youtu.be/RzWWOQMLttE
- tomComb 2y ago
  I'm a fan of CR and of independent testing. I'm sorry that the attempts to bring independent testing to the supplements industry haven't done better. But they too fall victim to the need to exaggerate every story to get better headlines. In this case, they came up with ridiculously stringent standards allowing them to suggest danger where there isn't. On the other hand, it is good that the outliers get scolded and hopefully they improve their processes as a result.

Rinzler89 2y ago

>Buy your chocolate from companies that don't use child slavery, even if it's more expensive. Which are those? Because most of those "made from Fairtrade/ethically sourced cocoa" labels you see on most chocolate bars are worth exactly dogshit.

Moru 2y ago
This one is a serious one [0]. It's a small local chocolate producer that has close contacts with other small cacao producers and buys directly from them. [0] https://nordicchocolate.se/chokladbutik/ https://nordicchocolate.se/chokladbutik/ Oh, and the flavour and texture is great. Lindt has nothing on these ones :-)
- jefftk 2y ago
  How do you know their practices are better than at your typical artisanal chocolate company? The kind of claims they're making don't look unusual to me.
  - Moru 2y ago
    Not sure what you mean with artisanal, english is not my native tongue. But she is a local legend here. Been passionate about chocolate since a kid and has worked hard to build a supply chain that works to her standards. Was on the news a few times showing the local sources of her cacao. And after tasting the chocolate I believe everything she says. :-)

okr 2y ago

Just curious, how to identify the companies, that use child slavery? Is there a logo on the packaging? How does it look like?

Vinnl 2y ago
It's fairly hard to do, but the ones that make an effort will generally at least have the Fair Trade logo. (UTZ is an weak industry-initiated alternative that does not cut it, as I understand it.)
not_math 2y ago
There's a John Oliver episode about the chocolate industry, you can check it out on YouTube. Of course there's no logo saying the chocolate is made with child slavery, I hope you didn't mean to be snarky here. There are initiatives to try to alleviate the problem, the only example I have in mind right now is Tony's Chocolonely (which explains the problem and their solution on their website) but I'm sure others could come up with other initiatives. The trends from top companies of chocolate is that they try to do as little as possible to alleviate the problem of child slavery in chocolate production.
- Biganon 2y ago
  > Of course there's no logo saying the chocolate is made with child slavery, I hope you didn't mean to be snarky here. ...? Quality labels are a thing, why couldn't an independent NGO overwatch the production?
  - cogman10 2y ago
    It's expensive, easy to bypass, and has little enforcement teeth. Expensive because you need to pay an inspector (ideally multiple to avoid corruption) to visit these farms. Easy to bypass because the kids aren't working the fields all the time and there's plenty of warning an inspector is coming. And the enforcement mechanism is you don't get the label... But like there's plenty of buyers for slave chocolate so that mostly means a minor hit on income. NGO inspectors are better than nothing, but we should be clear eyed in how much they can solve. The only way to significantly reduce slave labor is harsh penalties on companies that trade in slave goods. That was pretty much the only thing that collapsed the ivory market.

Lendal 2y ago

You left out why sugar is the cheapest part. Subsidies.

sophiacamille 2y ago
Isn't sugar just relatively cheap to produce and can be locally grown in Europe?
- WorldMaker 2y ago
  One of the biggest sources of the world's sugar today is corn (as High Fructose Corn Syrup), which is a rather expensive "concentration" process but is heavily subsidized in the United States by a large number of interlocking subsidies in US's strange, complex multi-grade corn system which leads to "cheap" access of lots of "waste" corn that that is "cheap as free" enough that the expensive "concentration" efforts are still profitable at cheap costs. One of the "best" sources of "plain" white sucrose (versus fruit's heavier balance of fructose) is sugar cane, which is a plant that prefers sub-tropical regions and often islands at that and historically required massive plantations with slave labor to get cheap and today involve massive expensive industrial harvesters and international cooperation of subsidies, grants, and colonial legacies. Maple trees grow in northern climates and real Maple syrups are expensive today as a number of subsidies expired and demand outpaced production and even available supply. Other fruit syrups compete against the primary uses of their fruits.
  - snovv_crash 2y ago
    To add: in Europe there is a large percentage of sugar coming from beets, which wouldn't be used for food otherwise.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    Why write such a long comment about USA agriculture in reply to someone speaking about european agriculture?
    - 2y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> or lower the price of chocolate. In the US, I can't even really buy chocolate anymore. About 3 or 4 years ago, it suddenly changed flavor... now it tastes like brown-colored wax to me. It was sudden and noticeable, and if I looked through old posts I could narrow it down to a particular month. This was across the board for all things Nestle and Hershey. Maybe if I got some snobby Eurochocolate, but I wouldn't know where. And sometimes I just like (or want to like) the candy bars I'd get as a kid. It's not the only food that's undergone one of these "now with 10% less sawdust" scenarios, Kraft mac'n'cheese comes to mind.

the_real_cher 2y ago
Did you try whole foods? Thats where my hippy parents get their chocolate and I mean that in a positive way.
1986 2y ago
Changed suddenly 3-4 years ago... long COVID?
freeone3000 2y ago
Did you happen to get infected with COVID-19 during that period?
jncfhnb 2y ago
It’s not snobby to buy food that isn’t produced by the largest, most evil food corps in the world. It has relatively little to do with Europe either. Go for Tony’s imo.
Maken 2y ago
3-4 years ago was the COVID epidemic. Are you sure you are not suffering loss of smell?
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  That seems about 1 trillion times more likely than that all of the chocolate sold here (made by many disparate producers) suddenly changed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

WorldMaker 2y ago

I don't think it is necessarily "romantic pontificating". They've effectively found (or more likely "refound" given there were probably indigenous recipes like this for centuries) that you can "cider" the chocolate fruit and like apple cidering the most effective (industrial) application of this process will be close to the source of the fruit rather than at an industrial junction of commerce such as Switzerland with access to shipments of both cheap industrial sugar and expensively labored cocoa beans. Even if the cocoa fruit sugars are more expensive in the markets of Switzerland than other sugars, the cheapest source of sugar at the cocoa plantation itself is still going to be the "leftover"/"waste" fruit. If the recipe these Swiss scientists have come up with is good enough, producers could start to build "whole chocolate" directly near the plantations and better compete in that market directly rather than in the cocoa bean "ingredient" market. That would lower the price of chocolate (more suppliers, shorter supply chains with fewer middlemen). If there's "romantic pontification" in the article it's as much or more the multiple reassurances that Swiss chocolate would remain relevantly competitive (and not just an expensive reminder of a bygone era) to such a massive increase of suppliers with access to existing "waste" products, should it happen. ETA: And/or such a process might open up a much larger market for shipping the whole fruit, not just the beans, and moving the expensive labor parts closer to the industrial hubs. That would also obviously alleviate labor problems at the edges (plantations), incentivize reducing/eliminating labor with industrial tools that wasn't as incentivized before, and might also bring production costs down overall (for cheaper, more sustainable chocolate).

Majromax 2y ago
> Even if the cocoa fruit sugars are more expensive in the markets of Switzerland than other sugars, the cheapest source of sugar at the cocoa plantation itself is still going to be the "leftover"/"waste" fruit. Not necessarily. Chocolate abhors moisture, so sugars derived from the fruit and pulp will need to be extensively dehydrated. Over some range of energy and capital costs versus refined sugar cost, it may still be more expensive to have "whole fruit" processing on-site than to import refined sugar for processing. > If the recipe these Swiss scientists have come up with is good enough, producers could start to build "whole chocolate" directly near the plantations and better compete in that market directly rather than in the cocoa bean "ingredient" market. Is the expense of sugar really what makes the rest of the production chain (roasting, grinding, and final processing) infeasible on-site? > And/or such a process might open up a much larger market for shipping the whole fruit, not just the beans, and moving the expensive labor parts closer to the industrial hubs. If you're contemplating shipping the whole fruit without processing, I think this would still be infeasible. The fruit is wet, which would vastly increase the shipping cost per kilogram of final chocolate. Shipping the raw fruit might also require a cold chain, depending on how likely it is to ferment or spoil en-route. You can analogize this to bulk shipments of sugar, where as I understand it early-stage milling is done near the sugar cane/beet plantations to remove most of the moisture. The raw cane sugar is largely dry, and it can be cost-effectively transported to sugar refineries for further processing.