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Business Daily

Have Swiss scientists made a chocolate breakthrough?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4796 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2024

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Chocolate is very important to Switzerland’s economy: with more than 200,000 metric tonnes produced each year, sales are worth almost $2 billion.

But there are challenges – not just over sustainability, but over exploitation. And the volatile price of cacao.

We meet the researchers who are coming up with solutions – including new, and potentially healthier, types of a favourite indulgence.

And ask: Is this enough to secure the future of chocolate?

Produced and presented by Imogen Foulkes

(Image: A scientist developing a new chocolate product)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

So we have all the taste ingredients from the cocoa fruit.

0:05.0

Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

0:10.0

I'm Imaging Folks.

0:12.0

Today we look at a new, more sustainable way to make chocolate,

0:17.0

developed where else in Switzerland.

0:20.0

If you think about the history of chocolate, we have always

0:23.3

advanced the category by innovation. Can it improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers? You use more

0:31.0

of what is already there, right? So instead of like fighting over who gets how much of the cake,

0:35.6

you make the cake louder and make everybody benefit.

0:38.4

The farmers get significantly extra income.

0:40.8

That's all coming up on Business Daily.

0:46.7

So the cocoa fruit typically you only take the seeds for the chocolate.

0:51.2

In a small laboratory in Zurich's prestigious Institute of Federal Technology,

0:57.1

known here as the ETH, chocolate scientist Kim Mishra and cocoa specialist Anyan Schreiber,

1:05.3

are admiring a cocoa fruit. Green and yellow, oval-shaped and the size of a pumpkin, in Anian's view,

1:13.2

underestimated if only its beans are used.

1:16.9

If you compare it with an apple, right, it's like you throw away the apple to use its seeds

1:21.3

and nobody would throw away this delicious fruit. And exactly that's what we do right now

1:25.6

with the cocoa fruit the system of

1:28.0

chocolate has a issue it's just not sustainably produced and it will not sustain any longer as we

1:35.7

see now with the cocoa crisis in west Africa where the cocoa prices have sought by 500% over the

1:41.7

last 12 months we see that the system is just inevitably broke.

...

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