Sunday, April 01, 2018

Why your chocolate tastes better

That chocolate you’re opening, it’s better than it used to be.

To most of us, there are only two types of chocolate: that glorious melt-in-your-mouth confection made with cocoa butter, and the lesser, waxy, so-called "compound" chocolate made with vegetable oil, about which I would rather not think. And please, don’t get me started on carob.

What most of us probably don’t know is that the main ingredient grows on trees, and generally only on small collections of them.

Ninety eight per cent of the cocoa pods used to make chocolate are grown on small farms where they are also harvested and fermented in a process that can’t be easily mechanised.

“They grow from the trunks and the branches, they don't grow from twigs,” says Fuzz Kitto, a co-ordinator with the anti slavery campaign Stop the Traffik. “You’ve got to cut the pods off very carefully, so as not to damage the nodes where they join the trees, otherwise they won’t grow again.”

The pods look like small footballs. Inside each is white pith and then a sack, or "placenta", which holds the seeds in a special fluid.

At the farm the seeds and fluid are smeared on banana leaves on tables that slope downwards so the fluid can drain off. Then banana leaves are placed on top. The leaves and the fluid provide the enzymes that are needed for fermentation, a process that takes three to five days. Afterwards, the seeds are taken to racks in a central point in a village where they are dried.

Most of it happens in Côte d’Ivoire (formerly known as the Ivory Coast) and neighbouring Ghana in west Africa. Between them they account for two thirds of the pods harvested worldwide.

From then on, things get big. There are only three big processors, and they sell to only six big manufacturers: Mars, Mondelez (which we know as Cadbury), Nestle, Ferrero, Meiji of Japan, and Hershey.

The processors crush and roast the beans to create liquor, out of which comes cocoa butter and cocoa powder. The more of the butter that’s included in the final product, the better it tastes. But there’s a lot of demand from other users of cocoa butter, including the cosmetics industry which likes it because it is so hydrating.

It’s a world away from the dirt poor farms that need boys, ideally aged 10 to 16, who can climb and have nimble fingers. Many buy their boys from labour agents who truck them in from nearby Burkina Faso and Mali. They are lured with promises of a better life, then locked up, not paid and made to pick and ferment pods with no way out, often not even knowing which country they are in.

How do Cadbury, Nestle, Mars and Ferrero feel about it? Awful. But it’s only in the past few years they’ve been doing a lot about it. Stop the Traffik’s first Australian breakthrough was with the Adelaide family-owned manufacturer Haigh’s.

Campaigner Carolyn Kitto says Haig’s was at first suspicious. Then, as it learnt more and discovered it was possible to work out where its beans came from, it became excited, and then proud. “Every time we turned up, the executives wanted to tell us more about what they had done,” she says. “It’s become about their values.”

After complaints and the threat of legislation in Europe, which is the world’s biggest chocolate consumer, all of the big manufacturers got together with governments, campaigners and farmers at the world cocoa conference in 2012 and drew up plans of action.

Nestle is aiming for 100 per cent slave and child-free labour. It is already up to 37 per cent. It is also funding child schooling, clean water and sanitation programs and has commissioned the international Fair Labor Association to audit farms at random.

When an early visit found slavery, fearful Nestle executives invited Kitto in to ask how she would react. She told them she would congratulate them because it meant their systems were working. “If you are not finding some slavery, you are not looking,” she said.

Mondelez is up to 35 per cent slave-free beans. It is funding community development plans in five communities. Mars might be up to 80 per cent, although it is only claiming 50 per cent, Ferrero believes it is up to 75 per cent, and Lindt operates independently of the big processors and tracks 90 per cent of the beans it buys directly from farmers and roasts.

The only Australian holdout is Darrell Lea, which has been in receivership and has just changed hands again. It hasn’t yet said where its beans come from.

Even better, Australia is about to get a Modern Slavery Act, recommended unanimously by a parliamentary committee. Every business above a certain size will be required to know and report where its raw materials come from. It'll leave a better taste.

In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald