Barry Callebaut, world leader in producing chocolate, funded their work and recently won a European award for chocolate based on this concept. The company has its roots in Lebbeke, East Flanders, where the largest chocolate factory in the world is still located.
About five years ago in Ghana, VUB doctorate student Nicholas Camu found out which microorganisms were responsible for the fermentation of cocoa. Since then, the VUB and Barry Callebaut have worked on creating an optimal starter culture, a biological basis, to control the cocoa bean fermentation and perfect the chocolate’s aroma and taste.
In the meantime, the Barry Callebaut brand, where Camu is now innovation manager, launched Terra Cacao. This chocolate, made with the revolutionary fermentation technique, won the European Food Ingredients Excellence award for the most innovative ingredient of 2011.
“Essential to our method is the discovery that the fermentation of cocoa beans follows the same process everywhere in the world, if it is done with proper care,” explains Camu. “Starting from there, we created a liquid that forms the basis for fermenting cocoa. The great advantage is that we can create superb chocolate with beans from one country, while in the past beans from different continents had to be blended to get the right aroma and flavour. We can guarantee that the chocolate is pure, without deficiencies or ‘off’ flavours.”
Professor Luc De Vuyst is chairman of the department of bio-engineering sciences at VUB. “This principle is also used to make cheese,” he says. “A culture of bacteria is added to the milk to prepare for the ripening.” De Vuyst now coordinates experiments to create chocolate with different aromas and flavours. “In the future, we hope to make chocolate with banana flavour without banana additives,” Camus says. And still, “it should be completely natural”.
It’s not only chocolate gourmets who benefit from the breakthrough; so do local cocoa bean growers. “Because there will no longer be cocoa beans affected by disease or fungi, the farmers will be able to produce more cocoa. Furthermore, the quality is sure to be better, with a higher selling price as a result,” says De Vuyst.
About 4,000 farmers are currently participating in Barry Callebaut’s programme of implementing the new technique, mainly in Ivory Coast. But Camu remembers the earliest days of the project almost four years ago: “Sometimes I had to drink the liquid starter culture to prove that I wasn’t going to poison their cocoa. Their scepticism was logical, since they had been producing cocoa their way for about 50 years. Now farmers are coming to us to ask if they can join.”
The starter cultures are prepared in labs here and transported to Ivory Coast, which is a costly affair. Local farmers are taught to ferment cocoa according to the new method. Camu: “Our dream is to make every farmer self-sufficient in Africa and other cocoa-producing regions, but we have a long way to go to fulfil that goal. Still, we are on the right track.”
Dominique Persoone, Bruges’ famed chocolatier, hopes the new technique will become the standard manner of fermenting chocolate. “Cocoa is a fantastic, but delicate, ingredient,” he says. “To control the fermentation while keeping the process completely natural is a big step forward for the whole sector, and also for me as a chocolatier. Hopefully it can also help to solve the shortage of cocoa beans now that the demand for cocoa is soaring in growth countries such as India and China."
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