What trends are you noticing in the chocolate industry right now? We are very lucky as judges and organisers of the competitions, we get a pretty unique view of what’s going on in craft chocolate around the world and new trends as they develop. We get to see new and innovate products, often before they’ve been launched and it’s always interesting to see trends work their way around the world like a ‘wave’. Salt caramel and passion fruit are good examples. Now they are everywhere, when we started these were still exotic innovations in chocolate.
Micro-batch chocolate has set many chocolate makers free.
You can experiment a lot more and with a lot less risk if you are trying a new recipe with two kilos of cacao rather than one tonne, as is the case in larger chocolate producers. We are seeing a fantastic world of innovation right now. Alternative ingredients are the big trend right now, from new sugars, recipes using fruit rather than sugar, vegan milk powders and new techniques such as barrel aging cacao, and new fermentation approaches, similar to what’s been happening in specialty coffee. This last area is really going to develop over the next few years and we will see a lot more cacao growers experimenting with fermentation. Chocolate makers in the Asia-Pacific region are particularly leading the way with this, they don’t have the baggage of traditional growers and established practice. It’s an exciting time for chocolate, with always something new to experience and learn.
8 Kennedy’s Confection May 2022
What experiences have you had of traveling to cacao plantations, how has it developed your understanding of the industry?
I never really understood cacao until I started to visit farms and talk with growers, technicians, cooperatives and traders. Then you start to realise that cacao is an agricultural product, a fruit and comes with all the challenges and issues of fruit farming. Chocolate is not just a product made in Belgium or Switzerland; it simply would not exist without cacao farmers. Unfortunately, though, the last 150 years have seen a constant decrease in any interest in flavour quality. We are only just beginning to recover this, but the greatest joy is to taste amazing and new flavours in dried cacao in a farm and see these transferred and developed in a chocolate bar.
What challenges are there in the cocoa industry right now, and what do you think needs to be done to overcome them?
Cacao farming as it exists now is not sustainable, no matter how many labels, schemes and new products are brought out to promote the idea to consumers that the big chocolate producers are handling these issues – they are not. Fine chocolate might be a small part of the answer, it can’t transform the whole chocolate market, but it can help some cacao farmers to develop better and more profitable farming though, which in turn can be both more environmentally and socially sustainable. It needs a sea-change in consumer thinking though.
KennedysConfection.com
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