Photograph from Eve18 on Flickr A recent headline in the trade press heralded: "Options for chocolate lovers tripled." Cynically, I thought this was a come-on for the release of a raft of new chocolate products from some mass market candy company. Intrigued nonetheless, I clicked on the link to see that current research into cacao genetics is starting to bear fruit (pun intended). Juan Carlos Montemayor of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Germplasm Repository and lead scientist of cocoa genetics at Mars, Incorporated, and his group announced recently that ten genetically distinct varieties of cacao actually exist instead of just three, which have been almost universally recognized by the scientific community for at least 40 years. Chocolate aficionados...
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Photograph of a longitudinal conche at the Felchlin factory in Schywz, Swtizerland. As an invited guest and featured speaker at the 100th anniversary celebration for major chocolate company Max Felchlin AG in Switzerland last week, I was reminded that chocolate didn't possess the smooth, creamy texture we take for granted today until Rudolphe Lindt invented the conche in 1879. The Swiss are famous for producing chocolates with a very fine "mouth feel," achieved through a number of manufacturing secrets, last of which is "conching." Perhaps apocryphal, the creation story of the conche says that Lindt, well known for his chocolate manufacturing techniques, left his lab one Friday afternoon to go hunting for the weekend, but forgot to turn off...
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Photo composite by Clay Gordon, photographs from stock.xchng So far, one food crop that has proved resistant to genetic engineering is cacao. However, that may change as a result of a new study, funded by Mars, Inc., to completely analyze the more than 400 million base pairs in the cacao genome. (The human genome has about three billion base pairs.) The reasons given for undertaking this research effort, which Mars is funding to the tune of more than $10 million, are to help identify traits that make cacao trees susceptible to the entire range of diseases, pests, and environmental stresses such as drought. Oh, and maybe even find some genes that contribute to taste. Why Research The Cacao Genome?...
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