Chocolate producers have traditionally used the beans from cocoa fruit and disposed of the rest. Food scientists in Switzerland have come up with a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit rather than just the beans and without using sugar.
According to the Chocolate, developed at Zurich’s prestigious Federal Institute of Technology by scientist Kim Mishra and his team includes the cocoa fruit pulp, the juice, and the husk, or endocarp.

The key to the new chocolate lies in its very sweet juice, which tastes, “very fruity, a bit like pineapple” Mishra said.

Mishra’s sees his invention as the latest in a long line of innovations by Swiss Chocolate producers.

Mishra was partnered in his project by KOA, a Swiss start-up working in sustainable cocoa growing.  KOA’s co-founder Anian Schreiber believes  using the entire cocoa fruit could solve many of the cocoa industry’s problems, from the soaring price of cocoa beans to economic poverty among cocoa farmers. The traditional system of chocolate production, in which farmers in Africa or South America sell their cocoa beans to big chocolate producers based in wealthy countries as “ unsustainable”. “Without
this commodity trade of colonial goods, Switzerland could never have become the land of chocolate. And cocoa is no different from any other kind of colonial goods. They all came from slavery.”

To those who point out that Switzerland never had any colonies of its own, chocolate historian Letizia Pinoja  counters that Swiss mercenary
soldiers policed other countries’ colonies, and Swiss ship owners transported slaves. Geneva is hub for commodity trade, and since the 18^th century Cocoa was reaching Geneva and then the rest of Switzerland to produce chocolate.  Switzerland’s chocolate industry makes 200, 000 tonnes of chocolate each year, worth an estimated $US2bn.