Developments in the chocolate industry

The global chocolate confectionery market size is set to reach USD 145.17 billion by 2026, exhibiting a CAGR of 3.50% during the forecast period, according to Fortune Business Insights™. The firm recently released a new report which explains that the improvements in the processing and packaging of chocolate will be a key factor in the growth of this market.

A case in point is the focus on innovations geared towards sustainability. One example is the collaboration between cocoa and chocolate leader, Barry Callebaut, and UK-based packaging expert James Cropper to better utilise waste by-products in the packaging process. Callebaut’s cocoa husk waste can be converted into bio-recyclable paper packaging by James Cropper, to be used as wrapper for Callebaut chocolates.

According to Fortune Business Insights, industry leaders are also engaged in integrating advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain to optimise agricultural processes involved in cultivating cocoa and coffee. Together, they are driving the chocolate confectionery market trends, as mentioned in “Chocolate Confectionery Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By Type (Dark, Milk, and White), By Category (Premium, Seasonal, and Everyday), and Regional Forecast, 2019 – 2026”.

By 2025, the Middle East & Africa will account for USD6.5 billion of the huge chocolate market, exhibiting a CAGR of 6.72% from 2016-2025, says Mordor Intelligence. This is largely impacted by development in retailing, the growing expatriate community in the Middle East, and the economic growth in parts of Africa.

Indulgence and health trends are crossing paths in the chocolate space. In another report, Transparency Market Research says nutritional chocolate bars in particular are going to witness increased demand from 2020 to 2030, as consumers try to live heathier lifestyles. Products like quinoa vegan bars and ruby chocolates are innovations leading to strong demand for cacao beans. Cacao beans demand is growing at a rate of about 7%, from about USD 10 billion in 2020 to about USD 20 billion by 2030.

Processing: Cocoa technical center

Among the European companies offering their capabilities to this market is Hamburg Dresdner Maschinenfabriken GmbH. The German company is scheduled to exhibit at Gulfood Manufacturing in November 2020 especially to showcase the product development and testing capabilities of its Technical Center to both customers and research institutions.  Here, continuous roasting for cocoa beans and batch roasting for cocoa nibs can be tested. Other processes applied in cocoa and chocolate production are also available.

Origin: Authenticating chocolate

There are many sources of chocolate, and knowing where a chocolate was produced or where the beans come from could one day be determined through chemical fingerprinting, according to researchers at the American Chemical Society (ACS). This technique can serve many purposes for the industry.

In an news that has spread in the industry since April, Shannon Stitzel, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator, shares: "The method we used to analyze chocolate bars from a grocery store worked well in the class, and the exercise piqued the students' curiosity. So, I started reaching out for more interesting samples and tweaking the technique."

How is fingerprinting done? It starts with understanding that chocolate has a unique chemical composition, and so fingerprinting relies on genes of the trees from where the cocoa comes from. ACS explains:  The genes of the tree the pods are harvested from, as well as the environment the tree is grown in, can affect the composition of the final product. Processing steps can also change a chocolate's complex chemistry. Generally, after cocoa beans obtained from the pods have been fermented, dried and roasted, they are ground into a paste, called cocoa liquor, which contains cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Sugar and other ingredients are added to the liquor to make chocolate. Any of these steps could be varied slightly by the company performing them, leading to differences in chocolate composition. Even more variation between chocolates from different regions can come from naturally occurring yeast in the pods that surround the beans, which can affect the fermentation process, thereby influencing the flavor compounds in chocolate.

Authenticating the country of a chocolate's origin is an important piece of information. Drilling down to the specific farm where a chocolate's beans were grown could help verify that the product is "fair trade" or "organic," as its label might suggest, or that it has not been adulterated along the way with inferior ingredients.

Early on, Stitzel's experiments at Towson University involved a well-known method for geographic determination. She used elemental analysis, which has been used to identify the source of a myriad of unknown materials. However, Stitzel wanted to go further and analyze the organic compounds in cocoa liquor to see if any of them remained after various processing steps. If so, they could be used as markers for more precise authentication testing.

Through a friend in the industry, Stitzel acquired single-source samples of cocoa liquor from all over the world. Her undergraduate student, Gabrielle Lembo, used liquid chromatography (LC) to separate the cocoa liquor compounds from various samples and mass spectrometry (MS) to identify their chemical signatures. Lembo's results showed that LC-MS is a robust analysis technique. Compounds, such as caffeine, theobromine and catechins, are detected in different patterns that make up a signature fingerprint. This fingerprint indicates provenance and cannot easily be finagled by nefarious producers.

Stitzel says that eventually their method could be used to help map out the expected flavor profiles of a chocolate, given its chemical signature. And she says it would be interesting to first determine the fingerprint of a cocoa bean, then gather fingerprints with each consecutive processing step to see how they change. For now, her students are expanding the application of the analysis method by looking at the chemical signatures of various forms of fair-trade and organic coffee.

The researchers acknowledge support and funding from the National Science Foundation and Towson University's Jess & Mildred Fisher College of Science & Mathematics.

Read the entire results of the study.