Chocolate Frontiers

12/02/19 • 28 min

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Chocolate can transport you to your happy place, some other-worldly realm, better than maybe any other food. If just for a few minutes. A product with this kind of magnetic pull - this sway over our emotions, was bound to become ubiquitous from the moment the conquistadors secreted the first cacao beans back to the Spanish court hundreds of years ago. It’s no wonder that chocolate is a $100+ billion industry around the world. We Americans eat just under 10 pounds of chocolate each every year, which, by the way, is only half of what the Swiss eat.

As we gift our way into the winter holiday season with boxes, and bags, and bars of the stuff, I got to wondering, where are the frontiers of chocolate?
For one, craft chocolate is creating a new wave of chocolate products and aficionados, much in the way specialty coffee and craft beer have over the past couple of decades. For this episode of Talk To me About Food, I had a good chat with Nate Saal, CEO of CocoTerra, a company whose mission is to revolutionize the art and craft of chocolate-making by making it more accessible. He explains what's happening in the world of artisan chocolate, and how his appliance will allow you and I to make our own, personalized craft chocolate.
Another frontier is the fruit that surrounds the cacao bean. Emanuel Gavert, an innovator at Mondelez, one the world's largest confectionary companies, talks about a "super food" snack they are testing which is made from the cacao fruit. Not only is it good for you, it also makes use of food that's been going to waste.
What we think of when we think of chocolate is also being defined by the small chocolatier with a storefront. Blue Stripes is a new restaurant in New York with a menu that celebrates everything cacao, from unusual shakes and juices, to sweet/savory bowls, to breakfast oatmeal.
Chocolate in more ways. All ways.

Previous Episode

Smart Kitchen to the Rescue?

The 5th Smart Kitchen Summit was held a few weeks ago in Seattle. Two days in early October when entrepreneurs, food techies, food futurists, and investors gather to check out the latest ideas around how to make the process of planning for, shopping for, and preparing foods/meals better. To make it easier, faster, cheaper, less wasteful, or in some other way more rewarding through advances in technology. A slew of smart appliances and smartphone apps were on display.

In this podcast I get the perspectives on some the featured ideas at the Smart Kitchen Summit from two experts in their fields who attended. Lisa McManus is a kitchen equipment tester. She’s a reporter and editor who also stars on PBS television shows "America's Test Kitchen" and "Cook's Country.Anna Marie Cesario spent a good part of her career at food companies like Unilever, attuned to the whole meal preparation process. She and her teams developed recipes that fit into our changing lifestyles.

In this show I also consider if and how any of these ”smart” solutions could help me in my own kitchen...

Next Episode

Zero Waste Shopping

Our lifestyle, for the vast majority of us in the U.S., demands the convenience of packaging. This dependence on convenient packaging is only growing as we live more of our daily lives on the go, and we look to light-weight, sturdy, sealed, hassle-free packaging (think plastic) to transport our food with us. And when we do eat at home, many of us are often too time-pressed or too tired to prepare a meal from scratch, so we turn to pre-prepared, packaged foods.

At the same time, many of us are literally feeling the effects of too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. We are worried, individually and collectively about the impact on our health, and, for some, even our survival as a species.

There is an uncomfortable, unrelenting tension between what we think we need, which translates into producing 300 million tons of virgin plastic feedstock every year, and the price we are paying in terms of the unsustainable levels of pollution we are generating, to live the way we do.
Recycling is not working nearly as effectively as it could or should. And while packaged food manufacturers have started to invest in alternative, more eco-friendly packaging to plastic, the fact is that the plastics industry is planning to make more food and beverage plastic packaging for years to come. Another, or parallel solution is for us consumers to just not ask for, or use as much disposable packaging. That is mostly what the zero waste movement is about.
This episode focuses on two zero waste shopping approaches. First, I talk to owners of two zero waste stores that have opened in the last year; Stephanie Lentz of Scoop Marketplace in Seattle, and Lea Rainey at Roots Zero Waste in Garden City, Idaho. Nothing is pre-packaged or branded in these stores. You bring your own containers, or pay to use the store's.
I also speak with Ben Weir, from Loop, a start-up that is testing a model where you and I can buy products in non-disposable, durable packaging that we send back to Loop for them to reuse when we've used up all the product.