old as a standalone bar, though clients may create what
please with it. The company will also roll out Velvety,
lk chocolate.
s a bona fide cacao nut (and a journalist on assignment
Bloomberg Businessweek), I was able to get my hands
ome of the Bold. It came in a small, round box deco-
d with a picture of cacao beans; inside were half-dollar-
coins of the chocolate. Based on the jungle imagery on
y Callebaut’s dedicated website—brace yourselves for
ajor marketing push—I was expecting a rainforest fruit
b in my mouth.
What I got was merely excellent dark chocolate: It melted
kly on the tongue and gave off notes of yuzu and kum-
, flavors usually associated with high-end products such as
hona Inc.’s tangy Manjari chocolate from Madagascar. That
ht citrus then quickly resolved into something darker and
tier, comfortable territory for eaters of Lindt or Guittard.
“It’s pretty conventional,” agrees Clay Gordon, author
fDiscover Chocolate: The Ultimate Guide to Buying, Tasting,
nd Enjoying Fine Chocolate, who had his own tasting.
This is not a chocolate [where] the fruitiness is going to
ck you on your bottom. They’ve gone with something that
will be fairly accessible.”
Indeed, Barry Callebaut sees WholeFruit as fundamentally
changing how the entire chocolate supply chain works. If suc-
cessful, it would be even more disruptive to the $24.5 billion
industry than the company’s mild, naturally pink-colored
ruby chocolate, which was released in 2017 as the first new
chocolate variety in more than 80 years. (Think of it as the
rosé of chocolate—not white, not dark, not milk.)
The company is already providing Mondelēz International
Inc.—owner of Cadbury and Toblerone—with processed cacao
fruit for on-the-go “wonder snacks” called CaPao. The bright
packages contain “fruit jerky strips” and “smoothie balls” that
are made using the juice from cacao fruit pulp.
There have been some high-profile precedents toward
using whole cacao fruit. After a split from his wildly success-
ful Max Brenner chain, Oded Brenner had an epiphany while
eating fresh cacao in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica during
his five-year noncompete period.
He returned as an evangelist for the fruit and opened the
Blue Stripes Cacao Shop in Manhattan. Alongside decadent
chocolate treats, he offers inventive cacao fruit products such
as energy bars, packets of cacao fruit pulp powder, flour made
from the pods, bottles of juice, and kid-size, squeezable pack-
ets of pulp. They all have a lightly tropical taste, with hints of
tart passion fruit and marshmallow and a faint scent of cocoa.
Another of Brenner’s creations, a gluten-free bread made
using the pulp and cacao pod flour, was pleasantly dense and
slightly sweet. He also uses the pulp in smoothies and fruit
bowls, which come with granola and add-ins like hazelnut
butter and yogurt.
Cacao, as Brenner sees it, is poised to knock açaí from the
top of the superfruit mountain. “It’s not an acquired taste,”
he says. “People like it immediately.” I know I did. be so
they
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Great chocolate, I’d suggest, is the most pleasurable thing a
person can experience in polite company.
And for the past 100 years, the process for making the
stuff has started in much the same way: The brightly colored,
football-shaped pods of the cacao tree are harvested and split
open. Inside each 7- to 10-inch-long pod are on average 20 to
40 beans surrounded by a sweet, white, nutrient-dense pulp.
The seeds are separated from the pulp, fermented, dried,
and shipped off for processing before being transformed into
everything from truffles and puddings to precious bean-to-
bar chocolate. The pulp, which constitutes roughly 70% of
the pod’s weight, is typically thrown away.
But that’s about to change. This spring, chocolate man-
ufacturer Barry Callebaut AG will begin rolling out what it
calls WholeFruit chocolate that uses the pulp to sweeten the
confection. The world’s largest maker of bulk chocolate—last
year the global behemoth produced more than 2 million tons
of it for the likes of Nestlé SA and Hershey Co.—says this ver-
sion contains 90% more fiber, 25% more protein, and 40%
less sugar than popular dark and milk chocolates.
The first release under the WholeFruit label, a dark choc-
olate called Bold, will go to chefs and chocolatiers in the
U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia. WholeFruit won’t
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY BARRY CALLEBAUT GROUPCRITIC Bloomberg Pursuits March 9, 2020Chocolate that’s made
from more than just the beans
is a delicious disruption
of everyone’s favorite dessert
By Matthew KronsbergCUCKOO
FOR CACAO