High Cocoa Prices Stimulate

Search for Substitutes

By Kevin

Happ

The staggering 100 per cent, increase in the price of cocoa beans in the last eight months has been pleasant for Islands cocoa growers. But it has its debit side—high prices have stimulated the search overseas for a cocoa substitute.

rpHE world’s chocolate makers, ledfactured sweets, as against 65

X by American technologists, are how trying to develop a pro duct that will make them at least partly independent of cocoa beans, their principal raw material, which is about fifteen times its pre-war price. The chance is that they will succeed, the wonders of modern science being what they are.

The search is mainly for a fat which will serve as a wholly satis factory substitute for the all-im portant cocoa butter, or cocoa fat, in the craft of chocolate making.

Already there are signs, dis couraging for the cocoa grower, that [the search is meeting with a fair amount of success in America.

Blumenthal Bros., of Philadelphia, have made a test-marketing of a new product, “choco-like,” which re tails at about half the price of true chocolate. It has a vegetable fat basis as a substitute for cocoa butter and uses only two pounds of cocoa beans per 100 pounds of man

pounds used in 100 pounds of regu lar chocolate.

Another American company, Cur tiss Candy, is making a “chocolate” coating with two fats as a substitute for cocoa butter.

In no case has the nature of the substitute fat been divulged. That, under present grim trade conditions, is a well-guarded secret. Nor is it known yet whether the substitute products will be as unconditionally acceptable to consumers as true chocolate.

Imitation chocolate has been made before today, notably in Britain, where it was tolerated dur ing wartime rationing, but by no means accepted happily. None of this earlier “chocolate” had the distinctive, universally-acceptable qualities of the real thing. The pre sent intensive research is aimed at capturing these qualities in a sub stitute.

It is the cocoa-butter which

makes chocolate the pleasant thin?, it is to eat. It is also a most con venient ingredient for the mar' facturer. It withstands the heat that is necessary to liquify it for mixing and moulding, and it sets to just the right degree of hardness so that the finished chocolate will retain its shape and shine break with a snap, but will readily melt in the mouth.

Other fats that have been tried in chocolate are not nearly as man ageable as the cocoa-butter For instance, they will not set to the right consistency after heating. The “chocolate” they have made in the past has had various faults, such as excess granulation or the sort o" hardness that had to be chewed rather than melted, in the mouth!

But science is on the job and the general opinion among Australian chocolate manufacturers is that earlier disabilities will inevitably be overcome by the experiments now being made overseas.

It is thought to be more than likely that a lot of the experiment ing is being done with coconut oil Processors are now able to produce a copha with a wide solidity range —anything from butter-softness to wood-hardness—and perhaps within that range will be found the ideal point for a chocolate that will snap, but melt. ris known that a lot of the American experimenting is be ing done with dairy butter, of which the US now has an em barrassing surplus. In the past, rancidity troubles ensued when an attempt was made to mix animal and vegetable fats; but this again is one of the disabilities that might be overcome.

Probably the endeavours of the re searchers are being made more complex by the fact that big quantities of fats are required for good chocolate. Cocoa beans con tain about 50 per cent. fat. The maker of a good quality eating chocolate adds from one-and-a-half to two pounds of sugar to one pound of ground beans. The mixture is then so heavy and stiff that he must add more cocoa butter, which

has been pressed from other beans, to make it workable. rE ingredients of Australian chocolate are rigidly controlled by Pure Foods laws. Regu lations in NSW, which are similar to those in other States, prohibit the use of paraffin or foreign fat with cocoa.

These regulations mean that, if and when a satisfactory and cheap substitute for cocoa-butter is found, it will be precluded from use in chocolate, sold as such in Australia.

But at the expense of a lot c publicity manufacturers could col; a new name for their product such as the American “Choco-like r and if the product became popular with the public and cost half af much as real chocolate, the demam for cocoa beans would inevitably be : gin to decline.

In any case, Territory cocoa growers cannot derive any comfon from the probability that the us= of the substitute, when found, wil be delayed in Australia. Quotation! in New York and London form thj

I basis for world cocoa prices, and I any change in those two centres will I immediately be reflected in Sydney t and elsewhere.