(A story by
Mark Schatzker at bloomberg.com on 14th November 2014)
As this future year
unfolds, the gap between how much cocoa the world wants to consume and
how much it can produce will swell to 1 million metric tons, according
to Mars Inc. and
Barry Callebaut AG (BARN), the world’s largest chocolate maker. By 2030, the predicted shortfall will grow to 2 million tons. And so on.
Because
of disease, drought, rapacious new markets and the displacement of
cacao by more-productive crops such as corn and rubber, demand is
expected to outstrip supply by an additional 1 million tons every decade
for the foreseeable future. Here, now, as you read these words, the
world is running out of chocolate, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its
Holiday 2014 issue.
Last year, we again consumed more cocoa than we were able to
produce. This year, despite an unexpected bumper crop, supply barely
kept pace with the recent upswing in demand. From 1993 to 2007, the
price of cocoa averaged $1,465 a ton; during the subsequent six years,
the average was $2,736 -- an 87 percent increase.
The world’s
most universally delectable treat has begun a journey from being very
loved and very common, like beer, to being very loved and a good deal
less common, like Bordeaux. Unfortunately, that is the least of the
confection’s problems.
Efforts are under way to make chocolate cheap and abundant -- in the
process inadvertently rendering it as tasteless as today’s store-bought
tomatoes, yet another food, along with chicken and strawberries, that
went from flavorful to forgettable on the road to plenitude.
Brave Breed
Hope
exists, however, in the form of a brave new breed of cacao, engineered
to be not just fecund and disease-free but also flavorful. This emerging
supervariety promises the world a steady supply of high-quality
chocolate -- and perhaps holds the key to how all future food should be
grown.
In the far north of Costa Rica, just outside the town of
Upala, stands a field that should unsettle anyone who enjoys chocolate.
The view there is of corn -- as far as the eye can see. The stalks
aren’t as military-formation perfect as in
Nebraska,
but the crop is as thick as they come. Farther down the road, there are
dairy cows grazing on pastureland, soaring plantations of hardwood
trees and fields of cassava. Every few kilometers, there is a pineapple
farm; at least once an hour, it seems, a fruit-laden truck comes whining
down the road.
The one crop you won’t see is cacao, the tree whose seeds are
fermented and roasted to become cocoa. Cacao used to be big here. At one
time, it grew so thick there were no dairy cows or pineapples. Miguel
Orozco used to raise it on this 12-hectare (30-acre) plot planted by his
grandfather, and it earned him enough money to send all seven of his
children to college or university.
Frosty Pod
In 1978,
a fungal disease called frosty pod was found on cacao pods along Costa
Rica’s Caribbean coast. A year later, the disease had made its way
inland, and before long, two of Orozco’s sons found pods on their
plantation blighted with brown lesions covered in a white, cottony
powder.
For 10 years, the Orozco family waged war on frosty pod.
They covered the diseased pods in oil, buried them in large pits and
burned them. Eventually, there were too many rotten pods to burn, and a
little more than a decade after the disease had first been discovered,
Orozco and his sons took a chain saw to every cacao tree until all dozen
hectares had been cleared. The family’s annual harvest of 12,000
kilograms (26,000 pounds) of high-quality cocoa beans -- enough for more
than 600,000 1.5-ounce bars of milk chocolate -- was gone.
Exhaustible Resource
Chocolate
lovers rarely pause to consider that cocoa might be an exhaustible
resource. Those who do generally assume that the biggest threat is
climate change, which is indeed expected to have severe negative
consequences. According to a report prepared by the International Center
for Tropical Agriculture for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
in
Ghana
and Ivory Coast -- which together produce 53 percent of the world’s
cocoa -- temperatures will increase by up to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit) by 2050, intensifying the dry season and causing
water shortages. The result, the report states, is that “cocoa-growing
areas will decrease seriously.”
However catastrophic, the threat
of drought pales in comparison with that of disease. Frosty pod
colonized Costa Rica in just two years. Witches’ broom, another
devastating fungus, in 1989 infiltrated the Brazilian state of Bahia, a
cocoa-producing powerhouse whose yield subsequently collapsed, falling
by more than half, from 300,000 tons to 130,000 tons annually, in a
decade.
Witches’ Broom
Before witches’ broom, Brazil
was the world’s second-largest exporter of cocoa. Today, it’s a net
importer. Neither frosty pod nor witches’ broom have yet descended on
Africa
-- cocoa’s undisputed breadbasket, responsible for 70 percent of the
planet’s production -- but Mark Guiltinan, a molecular biologist at
Pennsylvania State University specializing in cacao, believes it’s only a matter of time.
It’s
possible that an ecotourist could visit a Costa Rican cacao plantation
one week and another in Nigeria the next, accidentally spreading a
fungal spore that could bring cocoa production to its knees. Far more
likely, however, is that someone will inadvertently transport cacao pods
without first checking for infection.
“We have guidelines for
safe movement of germ plasm,” Guiltinan says, referring to the living
tissue from which new plants can be grown, “but scientists are the only
ones who follow them.”
Drought, Disease
As drought and
disease threaten to decimate cacao plantations worldwide, cocoa
consumption is just beginning an inexorable upward trajectory. In 2010,
according to the International Cocoa Organization, the Chinese ingested
40,000 tons of cocoa; this year, the country’s appetite will nearly
double, to 70,000.
Hershey Co. (HSY) predicts
China will be its second-largest market, after the U.S., by 2017.
India’s consumption has similarly escalated, from 25,000 tons in 2010 to 40,000 this year.
Despite the devastation wrought by witches’ broom, even
Brazil
increased its chocolate habit, from 161,000 tons in 2010 to 198,000
this year. As developing nations gather strength, so too does their
appetite for chocolate.
The world will respond to the mounting
crisis in two ways. The first is that manufacturers will stretch their
dwindling chocolate supplies by augmenting them with other ingredients,
such as vanilla, vegetable fat and flavor chemicals. Chocolate bars will
contain more nougat, nuts and other fillers. And their size will likely
be reduced.
Angus Kennedy, a former editor of Kennedy’s
Confection magazine, says that’s already happening. Two years ago,
Cadbury shaved almost 10 percent off its Dairy Milk bar, one of the
U.K.’s most popular treats.
Agricultural Improvement
The
second response is more invidious: so-called agricultural improvement.
Nineteenth-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus’s prediction that all
of humanity would starve as the planet ran out of farmland never came
to pass because, decade after decade, we’ve coaxed our crops to yield
ever more bountiful harvests. From 1901 to 2012, for example, U.S. corn
yields went from 18 bushels an acre to 170.
The reason chocolate
hasn’t followed suit is because cacao takes so long to grow and, as a
result, to improve. A corn breeder can raise three new generations of
corn in a single year -- three opportunities to select for desirable
traits. A new cacao seedling, by comparison, won’t produce fruit for two
years at the earliest, and it takes 10 years to reveal traits worth
perpetuating, such as resistance to frosty pod and increased yield.
New Strains
Nevertheless,
the race to improve cacao is accelerating. Of the multiple newly
introduced strains, the most renowned comes from Costa Rica’s
cocoa-producing rival to the south,
Ecuador.
CCN51, as the breed is called, is resistant to witches’ broom and
produces nearly seven times more beans than its traditional Ecuadorian
counterpart. Unfortunately, there’s a major trade-off: taste.
The
website The C-spot, which publishes flavor profiles of many varieties
of cacao, describes CCN51 as “weak basal cocoa with thin fruit overlay;
lead and wood shavings; astringent and acidic pulp; quite bitter.”
No
one is more worried about flavor than a Mormon grandfather from
Hanover, Pennsylvania, named Ed Seguine, who possesses one of the most
sensitive and sought-after palates in the industry. In the 31 years he’s
spent consulting, he’s consumed some 300,000 chocolate samples and is
so concerned with the potential erosion of flavor that he’s dedicated
the remainder of his career to preventing it. He, too, has sampled CCN51
and describes its flavor as “acidic dirt.”
Favoring Flavor
To
Seguine, this is in no way surprising. When breeders set out to improve
a plant, he explains, rarely do they focus on flavor. When generation
after generation is subjected to a single-minded focus on abundance,
taste is the inevitable casualty. Many chocolate makers outright refuse
to use CCN51 beans. Guittard Chocolate Co., one of the finest
chocolatiers in the U.S., is one of them.
“I think it has
lowered the quality of Ecuadorean cocoa,” says Gary Guittard, the
company’s president, who worries about the “incremental degradation” new
varieties like CCN51 will visit upon chocolate.
Over the years, there have been efforts to augment CCN51’s fermentation process to smooth over its most-glaring inadequacies.
“It’s better,” Seguine says, “but even the best CCN51 is just average.”
Lucrative Crop
If
there’s hope for the flavor of chocolate, it’s growing 33 kilometers
(21 miles) southeast of Upala, where a farmer named Jose Gerardo Ramirez
has plowed under 7 hectares of pineapples in favor of a potentially far
more lucrative crop: high-performing cacao developed by a Central
American agricultural research organization called Centro Agronomico
Tropical de Investigacion y Ensenanza, or CATIE.
The saplings
Ramirez planted in 2012 produced their first harvest this year. The
yield was minuscule, but within a few years, Ramirez expects to be
reaping harvests of 1,500 kilograms a hectare -- more than seven times
the Costa Rican average. He’s not worried about frosty pod, because his
trees are resistant. More important, the strains -- dubbed R-1, R-4 and
R-6 -- should appeal to Guittard and other producers of high-quality
chocolate because of their fine flavor.
Ambitious Task
That
flavor owes a debt of gratitude to, of all things, frosty pod. In the
early 1980s, CATIE embarked on a truly ambitious task: spraying frosty
pod spores on as many different cacao varieties as possible -- from
Ecuador, Guyana, the Upper Amazon -- and mating the most-resistant trees
with one another - - like breeding corn but in ultra-slow motion.
In
1995, Wilbert Phillips-Mora, one of the world’s foremost experts on
frosty pod, took over the cacao program at CATIE. Ten years later, he
began sending beans from his most productive and disease-resistant
plants to Seguine, who assessed them for flavor. Some tasted like CCN51
-- acidic and dirty. Most were just average.
A few of the beans,
however, exhibited the bright, deep, mesmerizing notes that make
chocolate such an ethereal experience. In 2009, two of Seguine’s top
choices were entered into the International Cocoa Awards at the Salon du
Chocolat in Paris. Both beans won prizes. R-4 was recognized for having
sweet, floral and fruity notes. R-6 was celebrated for its nutty and
woody notes, with undertones of brown fruit and chocolate.
Ushering Renaissance
Both
varieties could usher in a renaissance not only for Costa Rican cocoa
but for all food. What CATIE and Seguine have demonstrated is that
quantity and quality needn’t be a zero-sum game; that you can cultivate a
bumper crop without sacrificing flavor; that what’s true for chocolate
might also prove true for chicken and tomatoes and every other
flavor-challenged food. The future really could taste better than the
past. The question is, will it?
The day after meeting Ramirez, I
get a glimpse of what that tomorrow might taste like. In a lab at
CATIE’s Costa Rican headquarters, a sprawling campus surrounded by
volcanic mountains layered in mist, Phillips-Mora and I sit down in
front of ostensibly identical rectangles of dark chocolate.
In
the mouth, however, each tells a very different story. The bar made from
R-1 cacao is fruity with a pronounced chocolaty taste. R-4 tastes less
fruity and more acidic but still pleasant. The closest CATIE has come to
a supervariety is R-6 -- the most prolific producer with the best
resistance to frosty pod. Its flavor, as the Salon du Chocolat observed,
is nutty and woody, with top notes of fruit. Phillips-Mora picks up
citrus. I get raisins.
Deep Chocolate
Next, we taste a
Ghanaian chocolate that Seguine has shipped down from Pennsylvania. The
difference is astounding. Whereas the bite of Costa Rican is fruity and
complex, the Ghanaian is an eruption of deep chocolate. I am
unexpectedly reminded of milkshakes from my childhood, the likes of
which no one seems able to make anymore.
“It lacks complexity,” Phillips-Mora says, “but it really hits you in the face with chocolate.”
That
big, ethereal blast of chocolate is in danger -- and for the moment, at
least, there’s nothing Phillips-Mora can do about it. So many of the
world’s most-beloved chocolates, Seguine explains, are a geographic
melting pot of different varieties. Just as Bordeaux winemakers mix
cabernet sauvignon, merlot and other grapes to fashion their superb
reds, so too do chocolate makers blend different cocoas. Cocoa from the
Americas, which is often fruity and floral, can be mesmerizing in a bar
of single-origin dark chocolate but, Seguine warns, can overpower a
cake. An ideal blend, he explains, might feature a base of West African
chocolate, with 30 percent of Ecuador’s finest. The result, he says, is a
“tremendous depth of flavor.”
African Chocolate
In
other words, Africa is critical not only to the production of chocolate
but also to its quality. And unfortunately, the continent can’t simply
be planted over with new CATIE varieties. For one thing, there are
diseases in Africa the CATIE trees aren’t designed to resist. More
important, Africa has its own distinct cacao varieties, which play an
essential role in the continent’s characteristic flavor profiles. If the
flavor of African chocolate changes, then so too does the flavor of
many of the world’s most-beloved blends.
Ivory Coast
In
fact, they may already be changing. The world’s single largest
cocoa-producing country, Ivory Coast, is planting new hybrids called
mercedes. Seguine has sampled mercedes beans four times and each time
has declared them acidic and dirty. In other words, they reminded him of
CCN51.
But there is a light flickering at the end of the Africa
tunnel. After decades spent preoccupied with disease resistance, the
African cocoa industry is finally starting to take flavor seriously.
TCHO Chocolate Co. of Berkeley,
California,
which set up nine facilities in South America to teach cacao growers
how to breed for flavor, opened its first lab in Africa in 2013, in
partnership with the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana.
“We now
Skype with cocoa farmers to talk about the way chocolate should taste,”
says Brad Kintzer, TCHO’s so-called chief chocolate officer.
Kintzer
hopes that, in the near future, better-tasting beans will command
higher prices, incentivizing quality, not just quantity. For our last
sample, Phillips-Mora piles the three CATIE varieties on top of one
another, followed by a big chunk of Seguine’s chocolate grown an ocean
away, in Ghana.
“Wow,” he says, his eyes focused on some unseen
point. The blend starts out superbly fruity and nutty but ends with a
deeply satisfying chocolaty finish.
“The combination,” Phillips-Mora says, “produces a total experience.”
It’s
a snapshot of a more flavorful future. Costa Rica, which produces less
than 1 percent of the world’s cocoa, has lit the way forward. Will
Africa, the cornerstone of cocoa, follow? The future of chocolate
depends on it.
(Mark Schatzker is a contributing writer for
Bloomberg Pursuits. Opinions expressed are his own.)
Etiquetas: Culturilla general
