Chocolate's getting expensive. Some Canadian food scientists think they may have a fix

The Current7:35Chocolate’s getting expensive. Is there a cheaper way to make it?

Easter shoppers may have noticed that the price of chocolate eggs and bunnies has gone up this season. In fact, the cost of cocoa has actually tripled in the last year, hitting $10,000 US per metric tonne for the first time ever.

In response, some Canadian food researchers are looking into new — and potentially less expensive — ways to make the delicious delicacy, such as removing the tempering process and refining the crystallization process in chocolate-making to be more efficient.

"The people [who] are going to benefit from this the most are the mid-size manufacturers," said Alejandro Marangoni, a professor at the University of Guelph and the Canada Research Chair in Food, Health and Aging.

"We're talking about a lot of the companies that you can see maybe around Toronto, the mid-sized people who are going to be hit by this increase in price the most and who have to, by any means, reduce the cost of production," he told The Current guest host Duncan McCue.

Marangoni spoke to McCue about why there's been an increase in cocoa prices and why removing the tempering process could lower the price of chocolates. Here's part of their conversation.

What has led to this increase in cocoa prices?

The cocoa beans, which [are] the seed of a fruit of the cocoa tree, … has reached prices of $10 US a kilo or $10,000 US a tonne yesterday, when commonly they used to be $2.80 or $3. So that's more than a threefold increase in price. 

Most of the beans of the world come from West Africa, Ghana [and] the Ivory Coast. And what they have been experiencing is extreme weather events, in which rainfall has been affected. There's been some strange temperatures as well. 

And those trees are very sensitive to all these environmental conditions. So the productivity has gone down. But as you know, our sweet tooth, our desire for sweetness always goes up — and for chocolate particularly. 

Alejandro, this spike in prices is recent, but you've been looking at other ways to make chocolate for quite a while now. Why?

It was always the same issue: the price of cocoa butter and cocoa beans. People were seeing this coming. 

In a bulk food store, you can go and buy things like non-tempering chocolate tablets that you can use for cooking and stuff. That tastes like chocolate, is chocolatey, but it's not cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is the fat that gets pressed out of the cocoa beans, the roasted cocoa beans. 

And the trick here is to take another fat and to make it melt and give you the hardness and [texture] that you would associate with cocoa butter. 

So we've been working for many years now in and creating fats that behave like cocoa butter, but they come from different sources. What are those sources? Maybe you've heard of shea butter. 

There's things that you can do to shea butter, and mix it with fractions that come from the palm tree, from palm oil. That has some issues with sustainability these days as well. 

And then we also develop technologies to transform these mixtures into something that really resembles cocoa butter. And why? It's because of the cost. I mean, you're now talking about a fat that would cost $3 a kilo versus … right now, cocoa butter is probably $15.

WATCH: Poor cocoa harvests cause bitter price increase for Easter chocolate

Poor cocoa harvests cause bitter price increase for Easter chocolate

8 months ago

Duration 2:02

Poor harvests of cocoa — the key ingredient in chocolate — have driven up prices of the raw material, and it's showing up on store shelves this Easter.

And one of the things you've been working on is trying to get rid of the tempering process. Explain that to me.

Maybe you've seen the guy with a white hat, that appears in many internet movies. He's sloshing around the dark coco mass on a marble table, and he's sloshing it around and scooping it.

What he's trying to do is to get the cocoa butter to solidify, to crystallize. Believe it or not, cocoa butter there when it solidifies, forms crystals of fat. But it's got to be in a correct crystal form. 

What does that mean? A crystal form that has a melting point into your mouth. So it's got to melt in your mouth and not in your hands. It's got to be glossy and it's got to be hard and snappy. And that is only achieved with one particular of these crystal forms. 

So that guy is looking at this mass and judging its thickness, judging its gloss…. And he knows exactly the point after cooling it and heating and cooling and heating and mixing it with just the right form. And then he puts it into moulds and finishes the tabulating process. 

So that's very energy-intensive and requires a lot of expertise. And in companies they have tempering powers, you know. 

What we have done is discovered a minor ingredient that is a by-product of edible-oil refining that can be added to the chocolate mass and it sends directly the whole thing into the correct crystal form without the need for the guy with a white hat.

Will it still be chocolate if you put in that oil that you're talking about?

Well, it's a gum. It's a phospholipid, which gets removed from the oils at the very beginning of the refining process. 

Yes, it is, and part of the standard of identity of chocolate, which we have here in Canada, by the way; it's got to be 100 per cent from chocolate ingredients. It's already used. It's what people call lecithin.

Once you kind of removed that tempering step, did it taste the same? What was the taste like?

I don't know if you have experience [with] chocolates that have really high melting points; they just never seem to melt in your mouth. The other one is, like, if you grab the chocolate it starts melting in your hand. That's the wrong crystal form, too. 

So yeah, the chocolate we've made has passed all those tests.