“This is so bad,” Brett thought. “I’m going to show up in a country that had a coup for two years carrying twenty pounds of white powder I can’t completely explain.” In the movie version of his life, this would be the moment things go terribly, horribly wrong.
A call to Dr. Zhang explained the sampling procedure, but Brett still had plenty of time to think about what could happen: The trip to Madagascar from San Francisco is one of the longest trips in the world—a flight to Washington, DC, another flight to Dakar, a connecting flight to Johannesburg, and finally, a puddle jumper to Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo. Twenty-six hours of flying over two days—which Brett likens to a bad college hangover multiplied by five but without any of the fun.
And that’s just the first part of the trip. To get to the sampling area, Brett would then fly north to an island off of Madagascar and haggle with the locals to take him back on a boat to the mainland (all of them trying to charge him more because he is foreign and has a bag he’d prefer not to open). Back on the mainland, he’d take a taxi into Ambanja, a town not unlike the Wild West: one bank, one post office, and Western Union. From Ambanja, the end is in sight—just a long hike through the world’s most densely populated jungle of endemic plants and animals to get samples of one of the most treasured and increasingly rare substances in the world.
If you think all this sounds less like a book on chocolate and more like a treatment for a movie in which an evil genius hunts the jungle for a rare ingredient to fuel his plot to bring the world to its knees, you’re right. But it’s not. For the record, Brett Beach is not an unsuspecting drug courier; he is a partner in Madécasse Chocolate. Dr. Zhang is not Dr. Evil; he is the lead research geneticist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) and its Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory. Neither Brett nor Dr. Zhang is chasing world domination; they’re chasing flavor, specifically the DNA of cacao trees and the origin of the finest chocolate in the world—chocolate that has absolutely brought more than a few of us to our knees. And the future of that chocolate has a lot to do with the leaves Brett and a few farmers in Madagascar put in that white powder.
And no, that white powder was not cocaine; this is a story about cacao not coca—think FCIA (Fine Chocolate Industry Association), not CIA. But also think CSI: that white powder in question is a drying agent—a silica gel—forty grams of which are added to a plastic bag along with a fresh leaf from a cacao tree. The silica agent removes all of the moisture from the leaf within twelve hours, thus protecting the DNA from degrading before it reaches the lab. In that hot, sticky jungle of Madagascar, Brett Beach was pursuing genotypic identification and its connection to fine flavor cacao. He was gathering samples on behalf of the FCIA and the USDA-ARS to help map that world of cacao flavor.
Again, this is no movie, but the first part of our genetic story of the future.
In its first three years online, the CGD website (http://www.cacaogenomedb.org/) received more than 16,000 unique visitors from 131 countries. Not much for a site that blogs about Brangelina, but genetics? This was a landmark moment in the history of cacao in general and a turning point for discussions about fine flavor cacao in particular.
The CGD release was what many scientists and researchers call an essential new tool in the cacao toolbox. It unleashed a flood of new ideas and research as well as additional genotype maps from Mars, among others. Inevitably, a small amount of the work involved genetic modification and “better” cacao through chemistry. Most of the genetic research, however, centered on improved breeding practices, disease resistance, productivity, and genetic identification of the beans and flavor, and quality figured prominently in many of those conversations. For sure, genetic “fingerprinting” of trees had been available for years before the CGD, and many growers used genotyping to identify their cacao. But that genetic identification simply revealed that a bean was “Amelonado Number 2”—not whether it tasted good. Now people were asking at the genetic level if it had fine flavor potential.
Databases had existed for decades with information that might have been useful in connecting genotype and flavor. But Gary Guittard of the Guittard Chocolate Company, the oldest family-owned and operated chocolate company in the United States, explains that previous efforts to utilize that information and collaborate had fallen short. With more than a quarter century of experience in genetics and flavor, Gary ought to know. According to him, “Until recently, these collections were considered treasures, and they were not shared with other countries around the world. At the same time, these existing cacao collections were largely underfunded and remained incomplete or incorrect in terms of origin.” Today and for the future, there is hope. Following the CGD release, Gary notes, “A new agreement has allowed these collections to be shared, and this makes them the repository for the genetic history of cultivated cocoa and others as well. That must be shared around the world now.”
What’s the hurry? Gary speaks for many in the industry when he says, “My fear is that down the road someone says, ‘Hey, maybe some of these flavors are worth taking a look at for breeding’ or whatever, and they will not be around. We need to complete a map of what these collections hold and complete the collection before many of the genetics are lost back again into the dark jungle from where they came.” Hyperbole? Maybe a little, though hunting for wild cacao in Madagascar or the Upper Amazon has been likened to being in Jurassic Park.
Any hyperbole aside, there is plenty of debate on what the future holds for fine flavor chocolate and little to no dispute that there is incredible pressure on the world’s cacao stocks. In 2012, Martin Turton of the United Kingdom’s Food and Drink Federation told the BBC that by 2020 the world will need another million metric tonnes of cacao beans, the equivalent of another Côte d’Ivoire (the world’s largest producer of cacao) to keep pace with demand. Estimates from Mars Inc. concur. Boom years in production through 2016 had allowed supply to keep up, and according to forecasts by the International Cocoa Organization, world cocoa production will exceed demand by 382,000 metric tons in 2017 though demand was expected to outpace supply for the foreseeable future.
That’s because most countries have witnessed increased demand for chocolate of all kinds. According to Euromonitor International, which surveys confectionery products in 80 markets worldwide, growth of chocolate sales will globally outperform all other confectionery products by 2018. India’s chocolate confectionery market has had a strong CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 19.9%, in retail market value, between 2011 and 2015, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.6% from 2016 to 2020 according to the Mintel Group. In Japan, the perceived health benefits of cocoa among Japanese consumers continues to drive the domestic chocolate market, according to Euromonitor International. Huge populations in Brazil, Indonesia, the Middle East, and more developed cacao-growing countries with increasingly broad and sophisticated tastes for chocolate represent more growth potential. In the face of such worldwide demand, the pressure on all cacao stocks will only get fiercer.
Now, not everyone is as alarmed about current supply and demand trends overall. “The big companies continue to tout the million tonnes shortage by 2020, but one has to ask, ‘Are they sure, especially given what appears to be a market response way beyond what simple good weather can give?’” says Ed Seguine of Seguine Cacao Cocoa & Chocolate Advisors. But what is true according to Ed, is that the supply alarms have impacted the work of connecting flavor with genetics as companies in the sector shifted to “maintaining supply security and away from a flavor and quality focus.” That focus has remained at craft and other companies that are intensely focused on flavor. They keep hammering breeders to “include the flavor,” but there is only so much they can do. And something has to be done.
Flavor trees are often more vulnerable to disease, environmental changes, and replacement by other crops. An even greater challenge is replacement by single clone, high productivity but common-flavor and single flavor hybrids to meet demand for the volume-based cocoa market. Sadly, these flavor trees account for an ever-diminishing percentage of the world’s overall cacao production—around 5 to 7 percent of the world’s supply of cocoa in a retail chocolate market that Euromonitor International estimates is a $110 billion-plus global chocolate industry. Something must be done to increase the production and value of flavor trees in the face of these challenges. This is not the easiest of tasks, though plenty of good ideas have been floated and even acted on to improve the overall picture: efficient and varied farm growing plans and business models; higher wages and better quality of life for farmers; better husbandry; more disease-resistant and productive hybrids; improved and innovative techniques for fermentation and drying; different manufacturing methods and possibilities; certifications; industry and consumer education on every level… the list is long, if not endless.
Acting on all of these, as we shall see, plays a part in the many possible futures for fine flavor cacao and cacao in general. But in cacao, as in life, all futures must start somewhere, and for this fine flavor story it is in understanding the flavor connection to the building blocks of those cacao beans—their cells and DNA—to better identify and differentiate them from one another.
As Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, the USDA-ARS Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory research leader says, “Multiple components go into the flavor of the beans, especially fine flavor beans. Look at it as a series of fourths: a fourth of your flavor could be associated with the environment, a fourth with the fermentation, a fourth with the roasting process, and a fourth with the genetics.” Simply put, flavor is one indication of a bean’s genetics, and strong genetic origin has the potential to yield the best flavor. But as compatible cacao trees cross-pollinate readily, it becomes very hard to determine the genetics of a tree—or entire orchard—without DNA testing. A “map” that connects flavor and genetics could “speak” for that cacao and not only say what the beans are but also how they might taste when grown and processed well, in order to help protect, sustain, breed, and even market those fine flavor stocks for the future.
So let’s be clear about one thing before going any further: How do we know what fine flavor cacao is? We know it when we taste it.
Truth is, there isn’t a universally accepted definition, short or long, scientific or commercial, of “fine flavor cacao.” We know it exists and is different from bulk or ordinary cacao. The CGD has the genome nearly sequenced, and other genetic tools and technologies are available to evaluate it. There are largely universal protocols available to appraise its flavor. The fine flavor industry works closely with scientists, breeders, and farmers to grow it. Many groups and projects have studied the factors from environment to fermentation to shipping to processing that can affect its flavor as it turns into chocolate. Artisanal manufacturers and chocolatiers tout all these characteristics, as well as origin, terroir, and various certifications, when marketing their chocolate, to confirm its quality and justify the higher prices.
And still, really, there is nothing definitive for all of us to hang our palates on.
Not that everyone thinks that is necessary right now. Joe Whinney, a former cacao bean buyer and founder of Theo Chocolate, is a big supporter and marketer of the genetic work in cacao but says bluntly, “I don’t find a lot of broad relevancy to the concept of fine flavor. I understand it. But I don’t think the consumer is thinking about that. They think about origin. They think about percentage a little bit more than they used to. But ultimately they are still seeing chocolate as this sweet treat that if it’s dark it might be a little bit better and better for me and what kind of nuts does it have in it . . .?”
Okay, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been in the industry’s interest to create some definition and make it relevant for all the industry stakeholders. “After all, if we do not talk about it here, in the industry, no one will,” says Ed Seguine of Seguine Cacao Cocoa & Chocolate Advisors. And some very smart people have tried to define fine flavor—some at great expense. For example, Ed, who spent twenty-five years at Guittard and then served as a chocolate research fellow at Mars Chocolate North America (a major funder of worldwide scientific research on chocolate), was one of a group of authors on the Project to Determine the Physical, Chemical and Organoleptic Parameters to Differentiate Between Fine and Bulk Cocoa (2006), a $1.67 million, five-year study sponsored by the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) and prepared by the Instituto Nacional Autónomo de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIAP) in Quito, Ecuador.
The summary of the project proposal, which evaluated beans from Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, and Ecuador, is worth quoting at length as it explains myriad reasons that such a definition was and still is so important:
The definition of fine or flavour [sic] cocoa remains controversial as there is no single universally-accepted criterion that could be adopted as a basis for determining whether or not cocoa of a given origin is to be classified as fine or flavour cocoa. . . . The main objective of this project was to develop the capacity of all involved in the cocoa sector to adequately differentiate between fine and bulk cocoa, thus improving the marketing position of fine or flavour cocoa. The specific objectives of the project were to establish physical, chemical and organoleptic parameters enabling the evaluation of cocoa quality in relation to genotype and environment, and to disseminate selected parameters, methodologies, standards and instruments to be used in the evaluation of cocoa quality.
Unfortunately, the project didn’t get very far. For all its detailed work on fermentation and drying trials, chemical assessments, cocoa liquor preparation and chemical analysis at different roasting temperatures, organoleptic assessment of sensory characteristics by a trained panel, and DNA profiling, the project, in its own words, produced mixed results. It produced plenty of evidence “to reinforce the scientific basis that sustained the concept that fine and bulk cocoas had specific attributes influencing the way these products were used.” It also showed how genetic variability produces sensory inputs (flavors) like fruity, nutty, caramel, and acidity. It found that “the theobromine/caffeine ratio proved to have consistently good discriminating power to segregate fine or flavour from bulk cocoa,” which companies like Luker Cacao in Colombia have integrated into their breeding programs.
One of the ICCO report’s observations did prove particularly prescient: It realized the possibilities of international collaboration and undercut a potential barrier to cooperation: there would be little competitive disadvantage. In fact, the report stated in bold, “[I]n general fine cocoas from different origins have distinct flavour profiles, thus eliminating market competition among them because they each occupy distinct niches in the market. This situation provides a strong incentive for future collaborative research among fine cocoa producing countries to advance the development of the fine cocoa market.”
Two years later, the Cacao Genome Database was released and a collaborative spirit thrived, inspiring outstanding ongoing genetic work with a focus on flavor in cacao-growing countries. Dr. Darin Sukha, a research fellow at the highly regarded Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago and one of the authors of the ICCO report, is more than thrilled with the progress made on genetics and flavor for farmers, breeding programs, and the industry as a whole since the report was issued. “In the past, each chocolate company had their own protocol and vocabulary for talking about flavor. It was like two people sharing a common culture but speaking a different language. They knew what they were talking about but they couldn’t really communicate, change results, or have any kind of harmonization of opinions. Now, we have marker-assisted selection with the release of the cocoa genomes. We have some degree of standardization in vocabulary and in protocols that for the first time allows broader collaboration.”
This is not to say that everyone is throwing open the metaphorical doors and working together. Some origin countries, if not the growers themselves, can be very controlling of their plant materials, and the manufacturers are protective of the relationships that they have made with the growers. The Dominican Republic has literally closed its borders to protect against the spread of disease. Governments in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, as well as anyone exploring the Upper Amazon basin, want to control their findings as much as they can until they can capitalize on them, which is understandable. Knowing you have great or even unique plant materials and wanting to benefit from breeding them before anyone else makes good economic sense in a market driven by marketing as much as flavor—even if the cacao flavor profiles are different from others on the market.
Yet the collaborative spirit lives. Dr. Darin Sukha reports that the Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies has completed major projects and started several others related to genotyping and flavor. The completed project, “Modern Genomics Methods to Benefit Small-Scale Farmers” was funded by The World Bank Development Marketplace and led by scientists at the University of British Columbia. In Trinidad and Tobago, the report states, “cocoa was sold as fine or flavor cocoa in heterogeneous batches, with no distinction among materials of specific genetic, processing, regional or estate origins … resulting in a dilution of their intrinsic flavor superiority.” The project sought “to better define and elucidate the genetic influences” that would lead to “a more sophisticated cocoa industry by enabling a connection between cacao germplasm grown by farmers in Trinidad with the chocolate manufactures and ultimately with the consumer.” In other words, the project sought a fine-flavor connection from growers to consumers using genetics with an eye on enhancing quality, yield, and price for those growers to meet the demand of the market’s most sophisticated customers. The project was deemed a success with 69 farmers participating in helping develop genomic tools (which can aid in distinguishing different types of cacaos) and applying them to 95 cacao trees. The flavor profiles were assessed; farmers gained an appreciation of the unique flavors from their trees; and a publicly accessible website with an online database of the flavor data was created. The goal for the future is not only to sustain this work and develop even more precise genomic tools but also to extend it to identify cacao diversity outside of Trinidad and Tobago, drawing attention to the full range of distinct and distinguishable cacao diversity.
As that project reaches for its future, Darin reports on one of several projects beginning at the Cocoa Research Centre that seeks to “[leverage] the International Cocoa Gene Bank to improve competitiveness of the cocoa sector in the Caribbean, using modern genomics.” Funded by the University of the West Indies’ Trinidad and Tobago Research and Development Impact Fund in collaboration with Stanford University, Mars, Inc., and the Cocoa Research Centre, the project will “deep sequence” the genome of more than 150 cocoa types within the known genetic groups to collect their genomic information and to “identify molecular markers/candidate genes for characteristics of importance to cocoa farmers, buyers and chocolatiers.”
This is the exact collaborative spirit that inspired the FCIA and USDA-ARS to partner in creating the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund—the first-ever genotypic effort to “map” flavor cacao trees. This also takes us back to where we started our story: the sampling of the cacao trees in the jungles of Madagascar. A look at how this initiative formed and proposes to move forward in the future serves as an example of how genetics can be put to use by the entire industry to identify and promote the flavor and genetics of cacao and use that information to aid their beans’ preservation, propagation, and marketing position.
The goal of the HCP is an inclusive, better future for all cacao and the people who make their livings from it, not to denigrate bulk or ordinary cacao. It doesn’t say beans like the Forastero types that make up bulk cacao are bad and therefore all Forastero is bad. Fine flavor beans will never replace those used to make a Tollhouse morsel or a Hershey bar on Halloween, and the world will never return to the days more than a century ago when the majority of the beans were what we today consider to be fine flavor. The candy and snack market is too big and reliant on lower-cost beans; costs will always be too high to make fine flavor cacao anything more than the “high end” of the market. The HCP simply believes that the best chocolate in the world starts with the finest cacao and that cacao is poised for extinction. It seeks to maintain the biodiversity that is getting lost so that there is a high end in the future—so that when someone wants to spend money on the deep pleasures of a remarkable palet d’or or bar of fine flavor chocolate, it still exists. Life without a bar or bonbon that makes you scream, “Oh my God!” may seem unimaginable but it is possible, as growers continue to replace fine flavor cacao trees (and indeed entire farms and plantations) with high-yield, disease-resistant, less flavorful cacao hybrids and clones, cattle, or other crops like bananas, pineapples, oil palms, corn, and soy.
The idea for the HCP emerged in the summer of 2010 when representatives from the FCIA met with Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt and Dr. Dapeng Zhang of the USDA-ARS to talk about fermentation, DNA testing, and cacao growing. The discussion evolved into a broader discussion of flavor and DNA, and Lyndel thought the USDA-ARS lab could help the FCIA identify the cacao using the 5,300 samples in the worldwide database as baseline principal coordinates. (The USDA has been instrumental in working with several international collections and updating their accuracy.) Then, unlike so many big ideas, something actually happened. In October 2010, the FCIA brought its committee of artisan chocolate makers in on the idea and support was strong. When asked where the committee wanted to get started and learn more, Madagascar was the top choice. No surprise. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world, but the cacao trees are all within a twenty-five mile radius in the northwest—a small area that accounts for 1 percent of the world’s cacao production and its outsize reputation in the world of fine flavor chocolate. That’s how Brett Beach of Madécasse Chocolate wound up standing in Ambanja, Madagascar, in early 2011 bearing a suitcase full of white silicone powder and plastic bags, explaining to the town’s farmers how to collect leaf samples for genetic testing.
While the FCIA and USDA-ARS prepared to reveal Brett’s findings at the FCIA conference, they simultaneously began to develop the wording for the mission of the HCP, striving to make it a model for and complement to other preservation efforts on a collective and collaborative scale. The FCIA then established its specific cooperative agreement with the USDA-ARS to develop their ideas further. It announced the partnership to members at the FCIA conference in January 2012 along with an appeal for funding. And the members responded: Twenty-five large and small chocolate companies and industry stakeholders stepped up as Founding Circle members in the first half of 2012, providing the funding to allow the HCP to move forward. (The list of HCP Founding Circle members can be found in the back of this book.)
With funding in place, the HCP established its strict set of protocols for applying and then submitting, evaluating, and designating Heirloom beans and made those protocols available in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese on its website. It then engaged an international Tasting Panel to evaluate the chocolate and chocolate liquor (what the industry calls unsweetened chocolate) made from those beans. The Panel is made up of nine experts with more than two centuries experience in chocolate, all of whom have all served as professional evaluators of cacao bean flavor in the past: Martin Christy (Seventy%, UK); Pierre Costet (Valrhona, France); Chloé Doutre-Roussel (Chloé Chocolat, France); Gary Guittard (Guittard Chocolate, US); Ray Major (The Hershey Company, US); Jorge Redmond (Chocolates El Rey, Venezuela); Sepp Schönbächler (Felchlin, Switzerland); Ed Seguine (Seguine Cacao Cocoa & Chocolate Advisors, US); and Dr. Darin Sukha (Cocoa Research Centre, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago).
Does that mean the HCP and its Tasting Panel are saying Heirloom flavor can be evaluated objectively like genetics? No. The HCP doesn’t say Heirloom beans need to be old or wild, have specific genetics, or be present or preserved in international collections as conditions for Heirloom classification, only that they taste great. Antiquity is welcome but not conditional; after all, just because a bean is from a tree that has been grown for generations does not mean that it tastes good. Wild beans not in production are not what the HCP is looking for, and genetic analysis comes after flavor evaluation.
“First of all, it has got to taste good,” says Dan Pearson, chief executive officer of Marañón Chocolate and current President of HCP. “If it doesn’t taste good, we are not going to proceed. Genetics alone say nothing about flavor. That’s about classification and that’s the second step. We need to start with flavor, not whether a bean is pure such and such or ancient so and so.”
The process starts objectively enough: After beans are submitted from a specific stand of trees in production (which must be marked by the applicant or grower for future genetic analysis), the HCP blinds the submissions and anonymously processes the beans in its lab according to specific roasting profiles developed for those beans. The Tasting Panel evaluation, however, is purely subjective and tasty. The liquor and chocolate made from Heirloom beans must have terrific overall balance—complex and intense, long and pleasant—and unique flavor worthy of preservation, protection, and propagation. While no specific flavor characteristics are required, Heirloom beans must be distinctive in their characteristics and present special/unusual but well-balanced flavors produced through the beans’ genetics, terroir, and postharvest processing. If a supermajority of the panel scores the flavor sufficiently high enough in unique and overall flavor, the bean is designated “Heirloom,” pending a site visit by the USDA-ARS to examine postharvest processing and take samples of the marked trees for genetic analysis.
The HCP then looks to understand the connection between the flavors of the beans and their genetics. The database of this information is maintained with the USDA-ARS along with a GPS location of the farm, which allows the HCP literally to map Heirloom cacao genotypes and flavors right down to the farm level. All the information is also provided to the growers who, with the support of the HCP, can use the designation to achieve better prices than they would by growing ordinary or bulk cacao. (The HCP does charge only a $1 application fee, but when designated Heirloom, the applicant pays for the site visit.. When growers do not have relationships with manufacturers or other well-funded industry people to cover the site visit fee, the HCP arranges for bursary sponsorships to support those growers. All growers need to do is provide the beans for the HCP to evaluate and access to their trees once the designation is made.)
The first HCP Heirloom designations were made in 2014—two from Bolivia, two from Ecuador, and one from Hawaii (see the HCP website for details)—and the HCP is aggressively seeking to engage as large a network as possible to submit more beans endowed with a combination of historic, cultural, botanical, geographical, and most importantly flavor value. Reflecting the cooperative spirit that led to the mapping of the cacao genome years, the HCP calls all potential partners “collaborators,” be they cacao growers and processors or those utilizing cacao, such as traders, chocolate manufacturers, or artisan chocolate makers. It reaches out to all of them worldwide on an ongoing basis to encourage submit their beans for evaluation or simply inform the HCP of cacao in need of evaluation.
Think of the pioneering work of the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund and similar projects like those at the Cocoa Research Centre in Trinidad and Tobago as new tools in the global effort to promote sustainability and genetic stakes in the ground for flavor. In the short-term, the HCP and others can apply new genetic standards for flavor identification to help protect and propagate fine flavor beans. In the long-term, chocolate makers, chocolate manufacturers, and chocolatiers will be able to indicate HCP designations on their labels, supporting growers of fine flavor beans and alerting buyers to the presence of independently verified great flavor.
Ed Seguine calls all this work the beginning of a “paradigm shift for the future ways we look at the flavor” so we don’t “lose it like tomatoes and strawberries did.” Prior to his work with the HCP, Ed had not only put Mars’s money behind a recently completed genotyping project at the Cocoa Research Centre in Trinidad and Tobago (“Modern Genomics Methods to Benefit Small-Scale Farmers”) but also given the project “flavor.” Initially planned as a collection of cacao for genetic typing, Ed expanded the funding to include flavor evaluations on the samples. He used Mars to process the majority of the cacao samples into chocolate for the farmers to taste so their larger value could start to be understood by them.
Ed calls this “education from an engaged standpoint, where everybody gets involved on this journey of discovery.” And of course, that is the key to all these efforts and the most imperative step in preserving diversity: education on identification and issues around at-risk heirloom cacao, not only for the fine chocolate industry but also for consumers and media. We must explain how this type of knowledge and data will add value and make a real difference in the future. Because that’s the end game: explaining and reinforcing the importance of genetics and genotyping to flavor in order to preserve, protect, propagate, and identify more flavor beans in the future.
It should work—at least on paper: The projects touch on all the buzzwords most people in the fine chocolate industry and their customers care about: biodiversity, sustainability, and endangered species, to name a few. But no one is working on better tasting paper. If we could taste chocolate on paper, explaining what this all means for the future would be much easier to read. That said, if you haven’t already, we recommend unwrapping your favorite fine flavor bar or opening a box of bonbons to make this next part a lot tastier and to remind you of what is at stake.
The industry is one hundred years behind the times in another way too. Cacao is an ancient tree but for all the amazing genetic, scientific, technological, and other advances, chocolate production in places like Madagascar hasn’t changed much since the French started harvesting it in 1903. So while millions and millions of us speak the “language” of chocolate and 6.5 million farmers—many for generations—make their living growing cacao, the genetics of cacao is like a modern dialect few can speak yet. It is undoubtedly an essential part of the future, but understanding and processing the torrent of information and the possibilities it offers is overwhelming and, honestly, never going to make you drool with anticipation the way unwrapping a bar or opening a box of bonbons will.
Simply put, genotyping and understanding the genetics of fine flavor cacao will lead us to anticipate and better appreciate that fine flavor. But explaining genotyping and the genetics of fine flavor cacao—making them interesting or at least top of mind so that people who have a stake in the future of fine flavor cacao buy into their importance for their beans, businesses, and customers in the future—is a process. And if you think explaining this process is challenging here, imagine doing it in Madagascar. Not easy, even if like Brett Beach of Madécasse you speak Malagasy thanks to six years in the Peace Corps and international development projects. He had to explain not just the sampling, but why genotyping flavor matters for the future, and how it is going to bring value back to the farmers.
“The farmers got it as much as I could convey it,” Brett says. “This is a challenging and abstract subject to distill, let alone translate to farmers, especially if you don’t have much of a clue what genetics is in English.” The same could be said about the people on the other side of the world who gathered at the FCIA conference in July 2011 to hear the results of the testing on Brett’s samples; like the farmers in Madagascar, they got it as much as “it” could be conveyed.
The FCIA chose the right person to convey the information: Dan Pearson, and not just because of his work at Marañón Chocolate or that he helped found the HCP. Dan has the kind of deep-yet-cheerful voice that makes you lean forward and want to buy into whatever he is saying. Dan also understood on another level the meaning of the results he was about to deliver: He had already been a newsworthy beneficiary of genetic identification.
In 2009, the USDA-ARS tested a sample of the pure white beans that Dan and his partner, Brian Horsley, had stumbled upon on the Fortunato Farm in the Marañón Canyon of Peru. Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt compared them to the existing genetic database and confirmed that the beans were Pure Nacional cacao—a variety thought to have disappeared in 1919. In January 2011, a New York Times food writer tasted Marañón’s chocolate and started writing a great review when she became as interested in his discovery as the chocolate. The result was the first national newspaper story to link flavor and genetics for consumers. Lyndel was quoted in the article explaining how Marañón’s white beans were genetic mutations that happen when trees are left undisturbed for hundreds of years. As a result, they have “fewer bitter anthocyanins, producing a more mellow-tasting, less acidic chocolate.” Anthocyanins? This was not “Science Times.” This was in the food section.
Thus Dan already knew what it felt like to stand between Einstein’s knowns and unknowns when it comes to flavor and the genetics of cacao. He sums it up perfectly when recalling the conversation he had with Brian immediately after learning the USDA results.
“My God, do you know what this means?” he said elatedly.
“Do you?” Brian replied.
“No, I don’t!”
And that’s exactly the déjà vu feeling Dan got two years later as he revealed the initial results of Brett’s Madagascar samples at that FCIA meeting in July 2011. Standing before a slide with the eighteen samples plotted as red triangle coordinates on a graph with the four established cluster names for classifying cacao germplasm—Upper Amazon Forastero, Trinitario, Ancient Criollo, and Amelonado—in their own quadrants, Dan’s voice suited the dramatic results: Two samples were pure and rare Ancient Criollo—the first the USDA-ARS had put in the database; six of Brett’s other samples were genetically pure Amelonado, another very rare species that is disappearing; and eight of the remaining ten samples were flavor beans in the Trinitario cluster.
These results would be extraordinary under any circumstance but especially for the initial efforts of the FCIA/USDA-ARS partnership. There was a perceptible energy as people realized eight of the eighteen samples were extremely rare and alive—essential in cacao because to guarantee the propagation of a tree’s DNA, you cannot grow trees from seed; you must clone or graft from the tree itself. Cacao flowers are also promiscuous and will mate with any other cacao pollen that comes along; their “seeds” can easily not have the same genetics as the tree.
“The scientists,” Dan said, “were extremely excited and your farmers will be, too. We didn’t mean to surprise you, but we did.”
And then . . .
At moments like this in the movies, the audience stands up and applauds—that’s how remarkable these results were in the world of fine chocolate. But in the real world, like that night, profound moments like these often are punctuated by silence as people process the information—just like the guest of honor at a surprise party. Only the FCIA audience wasn’t sure what this party was all about. Surprise! They went from processing the facts to arriving at the same “I don’t know what it means” that Dan did when he first heard the news about his Pure Nacional. Any oohing and ahhing was reserved for the chocolate tasting that followed the presentation.
As Dan said later about the reaction, “Quite honestly I didn’t give the silence that much thought. Their reaction was probably the same as mine when I first found out, which was, ‘Wow, this is significant, but I don’t know how significant.’”
Many people in the FCIA audience that night and across the fine flavor industry in the months that followed were also probably wondering the opposite: “If the industry has gotten this far without a strict definition of fine flavor, why do we need to genotype it? Who would want this information?” But those are the wrong questions to ask. The right questions are: “Why wouldn’t everyone want it? Why wouldn’t farmers who put hard labor into their cacao trees want to know more precisely what they have? Why wouldn’t that information be of interest to their customers and anyone else? People are willing to pay more for food with deep connections to origin. So why not offer even more information by identifying the beans and classifying them in terms of flavor to add value to the farmers’ product?”
The importance of this is not lost on the researchers, either. “Creating an awareness of the value of this material, we automatically add value to it,” says Dr. Darin Sukha of the Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. “Look at Chuao [in Venezuela]. Who cares about Chuao outside of the broad context of cocoa? Is it perceived? Is it real? A fair amount of both. You have a lot of hype created by marketing but now you balance it with information that shows it can deliver on a genetic [promise]. Having a protocol for assessing flavor has been the first step in now critically examining cacao flavor the same way that you would do for wine and understanding what the components are that affect flavor.”
Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt of the USDA-ARS seconds that: “The genetic genotyping of the trees raises a whole other level of understanding for the chocolate makers. Today, accurate determination of genetic identity can also come from a single cacao bean, using molecular markers with a nanofluidic system to further ensure cocoa authentication. And as consumers get to know fine flavor chocolate, they are starting to move more toward this understanding. That has raised the level of the discussion to ‘Am I really getting what I think I’m getting? Is there something even better?’ as growers, chocolate makers and manufacturers, and chocolatiers try to differentiate their products from everyone else’s.”
Yes, as Jeffrey Stern, who spent six years sourcing and exporting single origin chocolate products in Ecuador, notes: “Even in the face of genotyping some growers and manufacturers will still call their beans an Arriba variety, even though that is not a germplasm cluster and there is debate if there is such a thing as Arriba flavor.” But at least with the ability to determine genetic identity bean to bean and tree to tree and a map of potential flavor profiles connected to those genetics, manufacturers and consumers will have new information to test and ask pointed questions, forcing more clarity and transparency in the world of fine chocolate. They can ask, Jeffrey says, about something labeled Arriba or Nacional for “traceability of both the bean variety and geographical origin for the beans used in the chocolate” and have some clue about what that means and how it helps them.
In an age when consumers care so much about the origin of their food and what their food is made of, genetic identification can go beyond marketing and ensure that a cacao is what a manufacturer expects, and that what’s inside the package is what the manufacturer says. Imagine a world where listing germplasm clusters on fine chocolate packaging becomes as prevalent as country of origin and other identifiers from percentage to single origin to fair trade and organic certifications—and correlates to what’s inside. To many consumers, percentage remains an indication of quality, not simply cocoa mass, and with no regulations or standards to tell them otherwise, even genetic identification won’t reveal anything more about that percentage. For example, something could still be labeled a “65% Madagascar Criollo” bar with only 1 percent of that bar being from that origin and cluster. Now imagine a world in which consumers buy a dark chocolate bar from Madagascar that instead of just saying “80% cacao” says “30% Criollo/50% Trinitario” from the origin—and understand what it means, the same way most drinkers of wine understand the taste of a cabernet/merlot blend from Napa.
Joe Whinney of Theo Chocolate would welcome this as part of an industry-wide push for more transparency. One of the first manufacturers to blog about cacao genetics, Theo has used genetic fingerprinting for years to guarantee ingredients through their supply chain from harvest to delivery. This transparency is a huge part of Theo’s value proposition, and the genetic fine flavor component could be an important addition. Dan Pearson agrees and hopes in the next five years that genetic identification can do for honesty in the packaging of fine chocolate what Felchlin, Valrhona, and other big fine chocolate makers did years ago with ingredients and origin. When those companies started saying what was really in their chocolate and revealed the source of their beans, they forced the hand of mass-market chocolate makers who were selling cheap quality for high prices. (This story is nicely captured in Mort Rosenblum’s Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light.)
“There has been plenty of ‘fine chocolate’ that has worked in the marketplace. But it is fine chocolate because the consumer was told it was; the emperor has no clothes,” says Gary Guittard. Better not to ask any questions, because if you don’t ask questions you won’t get any answers. Genetics allows informed customers and consumers to ask those questions: “What are the beans in that expensive chocolate bar? What is it in that sixty-five percent Madagascar bar? Hmmmm . . . this is good but is it really made from the wild Bolivian cacao? Are those beans really from Chuao? How much of it is from origin?” These are the questions about the packaging of fine chocolate that could be asked and understood in the future once genotyping flavor becomes a wider part of the cacao conversation, resulting in a new understanding, if not definition, of fine flavor chocolate.
Of course, genotyping flavor beans only guarantees what you could have in terms of flavor in that 65 percent, not how it will turn out given that so many other variables from environment to terroir affect flavor even before the fruit is harvested. Genotyping and percentages alone can’t tell you if that Ancient Criollo has been handled well. Pitfalls are numerous after harvest in fermentation and drying—and still you are a long way from making chocolate. As Joe Whinney says and many manufacturers echo: “You know there is a straight line between a merlot grape and how it might taste when interpreted by a winemaker. Cacao doesn’t have that straight line. The opportunities to impact the flavor of chocolate by the manufacturer are so much greater. My interpretation of that bean might be wildly different from how another manufacturer might interpret it. And as a consumer, I wonder if this genetic information is useful or more confusing.”
Anyone who has read this far or simply follows a thread on industry sites and social media feeds from Ecole Chocolat, Chocolate Noise, C-spot, or Chocolate Life knows the genetic information needle tips toward confusing right now—fascinating, but confusing. But in the end, you can’t explain—let alone preserve, protect, or propagate—flavor without knowing and seeing that flavor at its most basic level. Creating genotypic maps of flavor based on the germplasm clusters would be as basic as you get.
Interestingly, consumers and even many in the industry can learn much from the farmers in their identification efforts. Thinking back to the FCIA’s announcement of the results of the Madagascar samples in 2011, which Madécasse Chocolate then announced and explained to a consumer media audience in October 2012, Brett Beach disagreed with only one part of Dan Pearson’s assessment: the farmers he works with at Madécasse would not be too surprised at the results. They knew what most of the trees were and got both the Ancient Criollo right. Despite being from an undeveloped town in a relatively poor country, Brett says, “They knew as much as any foreign technician that works with cocoa. They knew based on the thickness and color of the leaves whether it was Criollo, Trinitario, or Forastero, and how to mark them for future reference. They just pulled the leaves off and put them in the bag. And when they marked the trees? They ‘tattooed’ them by tracing around the bark, cutting it off, and carving in roman numerals into the trunk.”
In fact, the hard part of explaining genotyping was never teaching people the established cluster names for classifying cacao germplasm: Trinitario, Forastero, Criollo, and Amelonado. Those four clusters have been in place for more than eighty years and are commonly known as types of beans by professional and consumer “chocolate nerds”. That’s also how the farmers who led Brett Beach through the jungles of Madagascar knew what they were looking for.
Given how much cacao is still waiting to be found and rediscovered and mapped with the thousands of beans we do know, we’ll likely need these farmers’ help tattooing even more trees in the future. We’ll just have to teach them some names for the new clusters. That’s right—for everyone just getting their heads around Trinitario, Forastero, Criollo, and Amelonado, comes the possibility for new, head-exploding information in the future: a revised set of ten-plus clusters. For such a relatively simply genome, chocolate is an incredibly complex food. Chocolate alone—before adding any sugar or inclusions (such as nuts)—possesses hundreds of flavor compounds (three times that of red wine). It is impractical to use only four clusters to classify the flavor possibilities. And while undoing those eighty years of accepted cluster classifications of cacao germplasm won’t be easy, the new clusters will be a whole lot more representative of the genetic diversity of cacao in the long term.
It is not too hard to follow the report’s topline descriptions of the research and methods, the accompanying graphics illustrating the results, and overall conclusions. But reading the entire report is not recommended for those who don’t find pleasure (let alone flavor) in Bayesian statistical analyses and devouring scientific sentences from the seemingly simple (“with the pattern of differentiation of the populations studied supporting the palaeoarches hypothesis of species diversification”) to the magnificently complex (“The overall Fst value [after 1000 bootstraps over the retained loci] was 0.46 [99% Confidence Interval: 0.44–0.49]”). So let us sum it up for you: Things are a mess in cacao genetic differentiation—lots of sampling, lots of errors, little reliable data for interpretation and use, and for a genetically varied species like cacao, not enough diversity in the current cluster classifications to understand and manage that diversity. So they decided to change those classifications.
Now, much as judges do not take overturning precedent lightly, the authors of this project were thorough in their deliberations. They worked together to reevaluate all the morphological data from the International Cacao Germplasm Database. They genotyped 1,241 existing samples in the database, and after discarding 406 that were mislabeled or highly homozygous (which basically means genetically identical, not uncommon with natural hybrids like cacao), they analyzed the 735 remaining samples. What they found was that the two traditional main genetic groups, Criollo and Forastero, and the remaining three groups, Trinitario (a Criollo/Forastero hybrid), Nacional, and Amelonado—were not cutting it for classifying cacao’s diversity. They instead proposed a “new classification of cacao germplasm into 10 major clusters, or groups: Marañón, Curaray, Criollo, Iquitos, Nanay, Contamana, Amelonado, Purús, Nacional, and Guiana. This new classification reflects more accurately the genetic diversity now available for breeders, rather than the traditional classification as Criollo, Forastero or Trinitario.”
The authors encouraged germplasm curators and geneticists to use their new classification to “conserve, manage and exploit the cacao genetic resources” in breeding and beyond. They then published the study with open access, placing all the information in the public domain where anyone can use it. The Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund, for one, will eventually genotype flavor using these clusters and has the flexibility to adapt as more are proposed or names are changed. And they likely will. After all, not everyone is rushing to accept the new classifications. For example, no one seems upset about the loss of the Forastero cluster, which was the most undifferentiated, but some people in Trinidad and Tobago are very passionate about the loss of the Trinitario cluster even if they understand the scientific reasoning. Speaking for several local stakeholders, Dr. Darin Sukha acknowledges that the exclusion of Trinitario from the proposed clusters was not deliberate in any way. Trinitario is a cultivar and the Motamayor study evaluated wild types of cacao and “original” germplasm. (Trinitario, Nacional, and Amelonado are all traditional cultivars, but only Trinitario is a hybrid and not wild.) But, Darin explains, “There are two sides to this question: The academic side that really does not focus on Trinitario as a wild grouping in this ten-plus cluster development, and the other side that must consider Trinitario in the context of marketing fine or flavor origins and Trinidad and Tobago as the ‘birthplace’ of this hybrid that is highly regarded in the fine or flavor cocoa market.”
Indeed, Trinitarios, which make up about 10 percent of the beans in the four-cluster classification, have been grown on Trinidad and Tobago for 200 years and those beans, along with their clones (like Ocumare from Venezuela), are highly regarded for their flavor (although the high-yielding Trinitario clone CCN-51 is not, and serves as a kind of bugaboo when it comes to discussions of hybridization and flavor). Trinitario types are a point of national pride for Darin and his colleagues: “We as a country should make sure that this information is not lost, but rather seek to use it to market our cocoa. The use of the name Trinitario in marketing of fine flavor cocoa is very important. We should all get emotional and passionate and make sure that Trinitario as a marketed fine or flavor origin or type is not lost, especially for Trinidad and Tobago. Niche marketing, branding, and geographic indicators are tools that we should exploit to improve the marketing competitiveness of fine or flavor origins.”
National pride and marketing, naming confusion, people’s natural stubborn resistance to change—all this and more means the discussion is far from over. These clusters are a ways away from being fully defined and gaining acceptance in the industry, let alone by consumers. After all, even experts in the field, like Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, are just starting to appreciate the genetic diversity of this relatively simple genome, which he reports are now divided into thirteen clusters: “We are trying to make the nomenclature more informative. We would like to use the river system where they are located as the cluster name. Unfortunately, there are overlaps and some reluctance to change current names. The broader industry still has not accepted the name changes. Maybe the bean-to-bar people will change this.
“What never changes is how the genetic diversity surprises me. I just don’t know that we have identified all the populations of cacao that are out there and whether we have looked at all the best and finest flavored beans that are out there. There’s still a lot of wild cacao in the Amazon River basin; we have just discovered a few new populations there that no work has been done on yet. As old as cacao production is, we have such a limited grasp of what we are working with. Cacao is so confused with the naming of it. It is so confused with how it’s grown and spread around the world. It is poorly tracked from its origin. It’s amazing to me that as old as cacao farming is, we know so little.”
Given this, it is perfectly logical to assume another group of academics and scientists may try to rewrite the clusters again in the future as the debate goes on and more cacaos are discovered and evaluated. As a result, the new clusters are even further away from capturing the public imagination—let alone generating national news stories the way the mapping of the genome and the discovery of Dan Pearson’s rare cacao bean did. “Right now,” Dan says, “all this is incredibly interesting from a scientific point of view, but show me someone who actually gives a damn. Whether there are three categories or ten categories is immaterial right now. You can’t chew on scientific accuracy, so it doesn’t make any difference to the person eating the chocolate, even if it makes a lot of difference to the scientists.”
“At least not yet,” Dan adds. “If someone can take all the scientific gaga and translate it so people can learn to do more of what we did in twenty-one months, and can coax the flavor out of a white bean that takes two to three days to ferment and a dark bean that takes five to six days, we’ve got something. Until now, we’ve just been paying all these people to write these remarkable reports that nobody reads. But there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Once someone takes one of these genetic varieties and learns how to bring out its flavor profile—and has a big enough marketing budget to tell the world about it? Then it becomes even more significant. Once someone with the genius and budget discovers a new variety with a new taste? Oh, you bet it is significant.”
Joe Whinney agrees. “The reason we have an interest in genetics is that we like to know a little bit about what kind of flavors to expect and what kind of nutritional value they might have. I think that the industry would serve consumers better if the industry understood and respected the genetic uniqueness of cocoa more. When we just try to narrow down the three varieties that is so misleading. There are more than 14,000 known varieties of cocoa beans. Without set standards the consumers can rely on or that the industry can help manage, it can be misleading and ultimately it is not a service to the consumers or the market. I think more manufacturers might even use it to extract some value out of regions that previously wouldn’t be considered that valuable. We could take some beans from Côte d’Ivoire and make some delicious chocolate with it. One country doesn’t produce one million tons of crap every year. The more transparent we can be about the breadth of this flavor, the more we’re actually telling the whole story, and people will have to tell the whole story behind their products right down to the genetics. Those are the stories that enrich the consumer experience.”
One needs only to walk into retailers such as Chocolopolis or The Meadow to confirm the breadth of the flavor story Joe describes: dozens of bars stacked neatly on the wall identified only by their country of origin, including Côte d’Ivoire. That’s the real value genotyping flavor has the potential to add, when it comes to flavor—it tells a deeper story about the bean that adds value to the end product. It allows the industry to drill down from the clusters and get more specific—specificity that will eventually be in everybody’s interest. The task may be daunting but filled with promise. If mapping flavor simply helps market fine chocolate and justify the higher prices fine chocolate commands and thus makes customers more willing to pay a premium for it, then more people will grow it in the future.
For example, the genotyping efforts linked with flavor by the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund have already helped Samuel von Rutte in Ecuador, whose beans were among the first designated Heirloom, receive a better price for those beans. It strives to help even less experienced farmers do the same by differentiating those beans with the Heirloom designation, getting attention for them, and even helping the growers find direct buyers. With help from initiatives like that of the HCP, government funding, and assistance from well-respected industry veterans and growers like Samuel, small farmers can learn to better understand and improve the flavor profile of their beans. Cooperatives and small farmers can then learn to link directly to foreign buyers who are willing to pay substantial premiums for increasingly scarce fine flavor beans. Growers can also benefit from the HCP and other third-party verifications that attest to the quality of the beans after fermentation and drying and upon shipping. This process can help establish trust between direct buyers and sellers and remove the need for intermediaries. The premiums delivered to small farmers and cooperatives will then go directly to them, undiluted by intermediaries that were unwilling to pay a premium in the first place.
In Peru, Dan Pearson of Marañón Chocolate is already banking on the significance and availability of genotypic identification from the propagation and production side. From his one Pure Nacional “mother” tree, as Dan calls it, Marañón took fifty starts and by 2011 had 2,500 pure trees growing. Since then, Marañón has continued to propagate that Nacional and has been working with the USDA-ARS to survey cacao in the entire canyon to find trees that have similar genetics. This allows the company to increase production more quickly without compromising flavor or quality. Recognizing that they could not compete with Côte d’Ivoire and needed to grow more premium flavor varieties, many of the growers in Hawaii have done genetic testing since 2009 to help plant better material, grow the industry, and market it as an origin of value. In Java, Frederick Schilling, a partner in Big Tree Farms in Indonesia and Amma Chocolate in Brazil, is already there, too. He bought forgotten land, converted it to organic, and planted a plantation of 150 hectares of old original Java Criollo trees.
Madécasse Chocolate is doing the same in Madagascar to propagate that pure Ancient Criollo Brett Beach sampled. But to him and many others elevating purity isn’t, and in most cases can’t be, the goal of genetic identification, nor should it be. For Brett, the importance for the future is not whether a field is 100 percent Ancient Criollo. Instead, he imagines fields with many flavor tendencies—fields where scientists help create trees and farms of 70 percent Criollo and, say, 30 percent Trinitario that are compatible and cross-pollinate, and that if managed right will at harvest have what Brett calls a rainbow of flavors. “That’s part of what makes Madagascar so good: rainbows of flavor that give it the depth. I’m not saying don’t do the hundred percent, but maybe try to control all the varieties you’re pulling from, to create diversity and consistency of flavor. If that’s what you want, then that’s a good thing, too.”
No matter what the clusters are named or how many there are, Gary Guittard is simply delighted there is still, for now, a rainbow of flavors to talk about. Guittard Chocolate Company was there in the mid-twentieth century when fine flavor was in decline but still more than 10 percent of the cacao grown (down from around 50 percent at the turn of the twentieth century). Over the next forty to fifty years, the company watched flavor become even less important, as chocolate grew more commercialized around the world and manufacturers used more of the bulk cocoas. And when it became very competitive economically and prices dropped, no one—manufacturers or consumers—demanded the expensive fine flavors, and people started growing ordinary varieties or just stopped growing cacao.
“In the United States,” Gary says, “It wasn’t until Scharffenberger in the 1990s that you had a reinvigoration of people realizing, ‘Wow, there’s actually different kinds of flavor in chocolate. This chocolate tastes different from the chocolate I’ve tasted! What’s going on here and why is this different?’ Today, with people so interested in where their food comes from and how it is grown, and heirloom varieties in crops like tomatoes, we have renewed focus on food and flavor and a new opportunity to map flavor starting at the genetic level. We have lost so much since bulk cocoas replaced flavor on the map. Now I think the public is ready for the focus on flavor on all levels.”
A focus on flavor starts at the genomic level and where this book began: in that Ancient Criollo leaf from Madagascar, packed in a plastic bag of white powder and shipped to a USDA lab in Maryland for identification. That DNA has the potential to help shape the flavor of chocolate in the future, from cultivation to consumption. “That’s really neat,” says Brett Beach. “That’s closer to making it a reality for all of us. I think it takes time for it to sink in. Having that shared audience and having people passionate about it makes it real because no matter what you do, if you do it alone it doesn’t really have much meaning. I’ve started to realize what this might mean. It’s a big part of telling the story of what is going on inside forests.”
In those forests as well as fields, plantations, and jungles, organizations worldwide are using genetic identification to build better breeding programs and give growers improved access to quality planting materials. But to ensure that fine flavor is a priority in all growing regions in the future, new and established flavor trees have two more immediate problems to deal with: the diseases that prey on them and the high-yield clones and hybrids that threaten their propagation. In fact, in the case of one high-yield clone, the two problems are even connected.
While no one denies that GMOs are real, and it is impossible to prevent scientists from achieving genetically engineered results on cacao in the future, as of 2017 there are no GMO cacao. The reality is that ingredients like genetically modified sugars already exist. In response, Theo Chocolate in fall 2011 became the first of many manufacturers who found it necessary to proactively address customer concerns about GMOs in chocolate. As part of its overall efforts to be as transparent as possible, all of its dark chocolate and many of its products overall are certified by the Non-GMO Project, a nonprofit collaboration of manufacturers, retailers, distributors, farmers, seed companies, and consumers dedicated to preserving and propagating natural and organic product choices. (We’ll discuss the broader significance of this and other certifications in Part Two.)
Despite concerns, GMOs are not immediate threats to the future of fine flavor cacao or cocoa and may never do anything more than fund new science facilities at Big Candy. The more immediate threats and cautionary tales are the high-yield clones and hybrids that have replaced and are replacing fine flavor cacaos in their largest growing regions. Now, for the sake of those who still reflexively cringe at words like hybrid and clone, remember what Michael Pollan taught many of us who are not in the food industry: hybridization and cloning are not synonymous with GMOs, which have altered genetics through things like gene splicing. Heirloom fruits and vegetables are by their very nature hybrids. And cacao cannot seed itself genetically—remember those promiscuous cacao flowers? Grafting, cloning, and crossbreeding can reproduce a cacao tree’s production, disease resistance, and bean flavor properties. But breeders often ignore or disregard flavor.
“I think there were and are a lot of folks who purport to develop hybrids with regard to flavor,” says Gary Guittard. “You will have people who will say ‘Flavor, flavor, flavor, flavor, flavor’ but the reality in the fields is flavor has not been that important an aspect for decades. Production has been. Ghana is a great example of what happened in the 1970s when they went and replanted most of the country and lost that West African flavor—even more so in the last few years because they have integrated more hybrid trees. They have lost most of the older trees. If you look at the flavor of Côte d’Ivoire versus Ghana they are not the same anymore. In fact, in some places Côte d’Ivoire is considered a flavor bean.”
For many in the industry, the most conspicuous example of the kind of high-yielding, hardy clone Guittard alludes to is CCN-51 in Ecuador and Peru (though Brazil, Africa, and other countries also grow the clone). Simply put, CCN-51 is a producer. It can produce anywhere since it does not need to be shade-grown in its early years like most flavor cacao and is tolerant to disease and difficult climate conditions. To date, it has the highest sustained production record of any cacao anyone has ever planted anywhere, outperforming all but the more recently planted and far less widespread Super Cacao in Ecuador by three to five and by some reports by a factor of ten or more per harvest, which for CCN-51 is twice a year. Average production in Ecuador is more than 2,000 kilograms per hectare (dry weight, fresh beans weigh about three times as much as dried) and losses to disease are much smaller than any flavor bean. In addition to its fertility, it also produces great rootstock for grafting.
With results like this, it is not surprising that CCN-51 is grown in addition to or instead of flavor. On the face of it, there is no reason a farmer wouldn’t want to do this. There are problems, of course. CCN-51 requires more labor and maintenance, not to mention lots of water, chemicals, and fertilizer because its root system rapidly depletes the soil of nutrients. CCN-51 also takes up to seven days to ferment as opposed to as little as two or three days for Ecuador’s flavor beans, Arriba and Nacional. Yet despite the increased time, labor, and maintenance costs, and even given the much lower price differential of CCN-51 on the cacao market, the income is higher than most farmers have been earning with the flavor beans that CCN-51 is rapidly replacing.
Another nail in the fine flavor coffin, another step toward a genotypic flavor map that is all gray? In fact, many people in the chocolate industry compare a future of CCN-51 in cacao to the evolution of another food that has resulted in a less flavorful world: the supermarket tomato. As exposed in Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit (2011), the rise of the perfectly red and round year-round supermarket tomato in the United States was the result of the success of industrial varieties that have more than tripled the yield of the plants but at high environmental (fields are sprayed with pesticides and worse), human (almost slave-like working conditions to reduce labor costs), and flavor/nutritional costs. Genetic or crop variation and labor conditions be damned: let’s grow fields and fields of this one tasteless version and nothing else. Give the people what they want!
The comparison of the tomato to fine flavor cacao is not perfect by any means. The human costs in Tomatoland are more comparable to those recently exposed among bulk cacao producers in Africa. But cacao is not an industrial crop harvested by migrant workers—the biggest farms, cooperatives, and plantations may be corporate-owned but are usually maintained by individual farmers. And CCN-51 was not developed in a lab; it was grown on an estate. The CCN in CCN-51 stands for “Colección Castro Naranjal.” It is named for the Ecuadorian cacao breeder Homero Castro, and “51” is simply the number of the Trinitario-Nacional hybrid (a three-way cross) that had the greatest success of all he created. (Castro created the hybrid in the 1960s but died before he could patent it, which is one of the reasons CCN-51 is so widely available.)
With today’s access to technology and research increasing our capacity to receive, analyze, and understand data and chart more productive paths with less trial and error—and with demand for beans only growing and outstripping supply—more powerful CCN-51-like clones could fill the majority of the fields in Ecuador instead of just the nearly 60 percent it does now. If so, CCN-51 will likely turn out to be only the current step in the evolution of these clones and may already be. For example, Cimarron Cocoa Estates in Ecuador is growing what it calls “high quality, disease resistant super trees called Sacha Gold, which are five times as productive as the typical cacao tree.” The program, run by two Americans, identified Nacional trees that perennially were super producers for whatever reason and propagated those trees into stands of “super cacao,” and the first hectare yields show it can far exceed CCN-51 and may have some fine flavor characteristics.
But with Sacha Gold and any other “super cacaos” many years away from widespread production, CCN-51 is remains the dominant clone in places like Ecuador. So, how does CCN-51 taste in chocolate? Most people in the fine flavor business we spoke to called its flavor anything from a polite “not fine flavor” to “horrible,” “crap,” “a disaster,” and “acid dirt.” C-spot calls it “weak basal cocoa with thin fruit overlay; astringent & acidic pulp; quite bitter beans & generally sub-par quality.” But that hardly puts CCN-51 on par with that awful tomato, because things are not so black-and-white in cacao. CCN-51 has more than just a passing resemblance to its fine flavor cousins: It has a flavor heritage and is grown in regions that are traditionally associated with flavor. While it will never be a fine flavor bean—though it was sadly passed off to farmers as such—the reality is a number of companies are looking at alternative fermentations of CCN-51 for the future and some sectors of the industry tout it as a flavor clone. And there’s the real difference between CCN-51 and the Tomatoland tomato: genetics is only one piece of any cacao flavor puzzle. Once it is harvested, the tomato’s process is done. Even Jeffrey admits, “If CCN-51 is properly fermented, and fermented separately from other varieties, and then blended with some Nacional beans that have also been properly fermented? You could produce something pretty decent.”
The tomato story also offers an idea of how we might preserve a tastier future. The rise of farmers’ markets nationwide in the United States, an heirloom and flavor movement among growers, and increased awareness of GMOs as well as growing public concern about origin, seasonal eating, and how our food is produced, have helped restore some balance in the tomato world—at least at the high end of the market. To paraphrase Marion Nestle, people are voting with their forks and building awareness of and resistance to the supermarket tomato.
This possibility exists in the cacao fields, too. Genotypic flavor identification can ensure that beans are specifically and honestly identified and can add value through flavor differentiation. In other words, there will be less chance to pass CCN-51 off as something it is not. The fine flavor industry is working with farmers to get them better quality materials for planting, to increase yields on their existing fine flavor trees, and to help them understand the value of their fine flavor beans. As a result, farmers are regaining national pride in the history and origin of those traditional flavors, and using the stories behind their products to better market their quality. And with the fine flavor market expanding just as quickly as the rest of the chocolate market, and those fine flavor beans commanding more and more of a premium, Ecuador and Peru are seeing some shift away from CCN-51, not to a better CCN-51 but toward Nacional and other populations.
“You go through Ecuador today and there are signs with pictures of a pod that looks like CCN-51 with a circle and a slash through it,” reports Joe Whinney from one of his recent visits. “The entire nation once mobilized around CCN-51 and bulk buyers will keep buying it, but now some farmers are starting to differentiate. Farmers, if given a choice, will usually want to choose a path of national pride, if they can survive. So if there is a development opportunity because there is a real market, I think we can all work together to move the needle in a few years.” Many in the fine flavor industry feel the same way, and strive to improve the lives of the farmers they work with as an essential part of preserving and propagating flavor that has as much to do with genetics as it does doing well by doing good—for the environment and especially the farmers. Only then, many feel, will farmers turn away from planting CCN-51 and toward Arriba/Nacional trees—but only if there is productivity from the trees, a market for the product, and a premium paid for the flavor genetics. Big and small seem to agree that there is. Nestlé stepped into the fray in 2009 with its “Cocoa Plan” and is now working with farmers to replant Arriba/Nacional trees with genetics that hopefully will have productivity to rival CCN-51 in the future. On a smaller scale Jose Meza and Barbara Wilson bought a plot of land in Mindo, Ecuador in 2008, and started growing fine flavor beans. Today, their cooperative of organic farmers, Cooperativa Nueva Esperanza in Puerto Quito, Ecuador, includes more than 50 farms and the Nacional cacao beans they grow at origin were designated Heirloom by the HCP.
“The reality is these new clones are coming,” says Santiago Peralta, cofounder of the Ecuadorian organic manufacturer Pacari Chocolate. “What we’re destroying is that genetic bank of cacao. We have every cocoa tree from the old cacao in Ecuador. What we are only seeing is the short term and not the long term. Long term what we need to have in nature is a variety. If there is ever a disease that affects these clones, then the result is going to be a catastrophe because it is all monoculture. So what we are trying to do is restore a balance and have trees that have a nice flavor and are local. And instead of putting only one tree, put a variety of trees—even some of these productive clones. Maybe every farmer would have one, two, five, even ten flavor trees, and they are local genetics, and then you have productivity and diversity. That for me is the key. It is not just a matter of productivity in the future but awareness of the importance of diversity.”
But before we can get to that future, Santiago mentions the other big problem that must be dealt with in order to stem the tide of CCN-51 and make it possible for fine flavor to be sustainable from an ecological and economic perspective. The reason CCN-51 could be planted all over Ecuador in the first place: all cacaos, but especially fine flavor cacaos, are susceptible to disease.
Truth is, despite Wilbert’s gentle delivery, those nightmares are well founded. Coupled with the smaller problems of insect and environmental damage, these cacao diseases have been nightmares for nearly a century and 30% of global cocoa production is lost due to pests and disease. And the fine flavor regions of Central and South America have been especially hard hit.
It was a one-two punch of frosty pod rot (often called monilia) and witches’ broom that hit Ecuador in the early twentieth century and wiped out Pure Nacional, then the world’s dominant and most sought-after fine flavor cacao. That’s why Pure Nacional was thought to be extinct until Dan Pearson found it in Peru, and why CCN-51 succeeded it, rather than replaced it, in Ecuador. While frosty pod rot had first been recorded more than a century before in Colombia, until it hit Ecuador the world had never seen devastation on that scale. Nothing had been so thorough in its destruction, save perhaps the unknown natural disaster (some say massive hurricane) in 1727 that took out nearly all the Criollo in Trinidad and Tobago and most of the cacao in the Caribbean. But at least that disaster had a silver lining for flavor: the introduction of Venezuelan Forastero to the island, which when crossbred with the remaining Criollo trees led to the creation of the Trinitario hybrid. Few would call the arrival of CCN-51 decades after the devastation wrought by frosty pod rot a silver lining unless you consider the alternative of no cacao at all.
While neither frosty pod rot nor witches’ broom kills its victims, yield losses are so extreme that what’s left is not worth maintaining and farmers often abandon the industry, which was the case with any remaining Nacional in Ecuador by 1925 and then again when frosty pod rot spread north to Panama. Following the Panamanian outbreak in 1956, Wilbert recounts in Fifty Years of Frosty Pod Rot in Central America, the disease spread to Costa Rica in 1978 and then rapidly through eight more countries before its arrival in Mexico in 2005. According to Wilbert, frosty pod rot has “limited geographic range [but] unlimited potential for damage,” and without aggressive management, even the most disease-resistant trees can lose up to 30 percent of their pods. Less resistant varieties, especially those planted close together in fields with little diversity, can lose as much as 90 percent of their yield, which was the case in Costa Rica. Frosty pod rot turned the country from a net exporter of cacao to a net importer in less than a year.
Steve De Vries of De Vries Chocolate saw what unchecked devastation from frosty pod looks like in Mexico when he led a trip there in 2011. The disease may have hit the country a little more slowly than it did Costa Rica, but it still has resulted in production drops from 50,000 tons a year to half that or less. Couple these losses with the country’s high labor costs, which in the Mexican state of Tabasco is the result of competition with the petroleum industry, and even the farmers who survived are turning away from cacao. On the bright side, this could be a potential boon to the flavor industry in Mexico as those farmers who remain in the cacao business are turning to flavor beans to get the price they need to survive. But as Steve says, “Their success depends on how the monilia shakes out. We saw several places that wanted to do this but looked like they would never make it because the monilia was just all over the place. So now some of those places are just pulling out the cacao and putting in pastures for cattle.”
Witches’ broom is also in Mexico but affects primarily lime trees at this point. It has mostly stayed south of the Panama Canal in cacao to wreak havoc in South America, causing losses of up to 75 percent in infected trees. No story of its damage is more gruesome than what happened in Brazil. Industry expert Chloé Doutre-Roussel proved in her presentation at the January 2012 FCIA conference that not even the allure of a French accent makes any of the following details more pleasant to hear: Brazil is still recovering from a twelve-year battle (1985 to 1997) with witches’ broom, which resulted in 70 percent cacao loss and the country, like Costa Rica before it, going from net exporter to net importer.
Even more troubling is the fact that the witches’ broom attack in Brazil is now commonly regarded as an act of bioterrorism. Reported by Chloé in the October 2011 article “Brésil & Balai de sorcière: un crime, pas un accident?” (“Brazil and Witches’ Broom: A Crime, Not an Accident?”) and first brought to light in an article from Veja magazine, six people connected to the Workers’ Party attacked several plantations in southern Bahia with witches’ broom in order to undermine the political influence of the “barons of cocoa” and destroy their livelihoods. The plot did not succeed in claiming power but they did destroy one of the more vibrant cacao industries in the world. Replanting was unsuccessful. Land was abandoned. Suicides became common. And a major agricultural industry in the world’s fifth largest country was brought to its knees.
Terrifying stuff and a very, very real threat now and in the future—so real that the Dominican Republic, one of the rare countries where no cacao disease is present, closed its borders to all cacao material and any genetic and agricultural research. “This is a very privileged condition that obviously people want to keep and maintain,” says Massimiliano Wax of Rizek Cacao. “We are lucky right now: we have a good mix of genetic material, but we cannot say that our cocoa genetically is as good as some regions in Venezuela or regions of Ecuador. Thanks to good selection and good investment in postharvest, and also education and training and certification to the farmers, we are able to score some flavor points. But there’s still a lot to do in terms of genetic research to improve these breeds. This is really a problem for the future. We should be able to find a safe way of researching and bringing in genetic material. But then researchers look at Costa Rica and the monilia, and legislators think of Brazil and see this terrorism is very easy to do, so they refuse. We are stuck no matter the strong desire.”
Overreaction? Not according to Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt of the USDA-ARS, an expert on plant pathogens. He says closing borders is “probably the only way right now” to absolutely deal with these fungi: “You never know what might happen with the movement of these pathogens. Someone picks up a pod and without even thinking transports it to another place and spreads the disease. That’s what we saw with frosty pod where the pods went to another country, and thinking it is not going to be a problem, and all of a sudden it starts to rot and they throw it away and it produces spores, and the next thing you know you’ve got airborne spores and an outbreak of frosty pod. And you can’t control it. You can only manage it, and manage it in the right way for your particular environment and for the particular pathogens that you’re facing. For the immediate future that’s how you can still get the yields. It’s got to be a managed crop.”
The problem is that cacao is not traditionally a managed crop. It is historically an amalgam of orphan crop, neglected crop, and underutilized crop. This is why even the most optimistic people in the business believe it is not a question of whether one of these diseases will jump to another country or continent in the future; it’s a question of when and where.
Southeast Asia has some growing problems, and the insect known as the “cocoa pod borer” causes considerable damage for a season (growers in Papua New Guinea recently had flavor crops destroyed by it), but losses are not comparable to those from frosty pod rot and witches’ broom; they do not exist there . . . yet. But the environmental conditions are similar to South and Central America and frosty pod rot or witches’ broom could thrive if introduced. Right now, Western Africa has some major labor and fungal problems (brown pod rot), but none caused by these major pathogens. Moreover, the drier air and soil conditions in Western Africa are not necessarily conducive to fungi development. According to the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), governments in parts of Africa, notably Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, do not allow the importing of any genetic material for the same reasons as the Dominican Republic: What if frosty pod rot arrived in Western Africa? Dr. Wilbert Phillips-Mora is not alone in believing the cocoa industry would be unprepared and face collapse.
Wilbert tried to address this lack of preparation by requesting funding for a crew in Mexico to study how frosty pod rot behaves in a new country. He wanted to try to predict its behavior and develop strategies to deal with it if it spreads again. But he was rebuffed—a missed opportunity that can only be remedied in the future by an outbreak somewhere. Until then, many people like Wilbert are on the ground in South and Central America—from government-backed groups to international corporations and aid groups to individual manufacturers—to manage the current situation. Scientists like Lyndel are on the ground, too, studying the interaction between the pathogens and the trees to get a better understanding of what actually constitutes and causes the disease, to help that management and see if there’s anything that can be done genetically to alleviate or moderate disease interaction in the future. And farmer education is also playing its part, from basic management techniques to introducing genetic and biodiversity (i.e., planting a variety of cacao and other crop materials because diseases thrive in homogenous fields).
Dr. Darin Sukha at the Cocoa Research Centre at the University of the West Indies, who has worked on projects in his native Trinidad and Tobago as well as in Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Dominica, and West Africa, sees this return to diversity as extremely important for sustainability of cacao as a whole and fine flavor specifically: “The loss of genetic diversity in farmer selections in the 1960s and 1970s was disheartening, but now we have an awareness of the diversity that exists. There is a desire to capture this old material in ancient growing regions as a sort of linchpin of the genetic diversity, and use that as the basis for fuller breeding.” That’s why the Cocoa Research Unit leads expeditions into the Upper Amazon to find varieties in the wild and test them for disease resistance and flavor. Says Darin, “These traditional varieties may not be the most prolific but by virtue of their being around for so long they would have surely displayed some level of adaptability to disease conditions as well as the environments that prevail in the countries or areas that they are found.”
Dr. Wilbert Phillips-Mora agrees: “In Central America, Ancient Criollo is the high-quality material people talk about, but it is among the most susceptible to disease and could actually spread the disease. The material is interesting in terms of quality but the risks are great to the farmer. The basic data says that 70 percent of the cacao produced belongs to just one of the ten genetic groups of cacao—70 percent is Forastero! Using the wide genetic diversity of cacao could solve most of the problems by introducing genes that fight against monilia and incorporating them and seeing how the cacao develops. In other words, creating a blend at the genetic level, no different from what a chocolate maker does in manufacturing to get the flavor profile they want: combine the traits of production, disease resistance, and quality through breeding and produce a kind of polyclone.”
But progress in breeding these polyclones has been slow. Interesting opportunities to work with the genetic diversity of cacao have been lost. Some of the slowness has been due to a lack of funding from governments and other organizations after decades of depressed cocoa prices in the 1980s and 1990s that followed the extremely elevated prices of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of it has been the result of little collaboration and shared database material between collections (detailed by Gary Guittard and others at the start of this section). And some of it has been because of poor access to genetic information at the molecular level until the Cacao Genome Database (CGD) made the sequenced genotype available. Progress was even slow at CATIE, which holds a special place in the CGD story: the sequenced genotype in the CGD is Matina 1-6, a Forastero clone from the CATIE collection that used to thrive on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast until frosty pod rot destroyed the population.
The main reason progress in breeding has been slow, however, is that genetic breeding and improvement in perennials such as cacao is a painfully slow process. Producing one variety for farmers could take up to twenty years. It took CATIE fourteen years to establish its clonal gardens in Central America. “The result of all this slowness is there has been a complete lack of variety for breeding programs and farmers,” says Wilbert. “There are a few new varieties available worldwide—some from Papua New Guinea, some from Ecuador, some from CATIE—but they’re not very common. If you check the material being planted at this moment in the world, we are using exactly the same material that was recommended forty years ago by the original researchers.”
So how do we improve this breeding to preserve and propagate flavor?
Many manufacturers believe that to continue to grow and meet consumer demand for higher-quality chocolate, they cannot expect to get their fine flavor cacao from the countries affected by disease problems. Now, no one thinks that that any genetic advancements will allow cacao to be grown sustainably outside the 20/20 belt or zone—the area twenty degrees north and south of the equator where cacao grows worldwide—any time soon, if at all. But internationalization is key. Flavors must move to other parts of the world where there is more opportunity—more farmers with the incentive to grow fine flavor cacao and fewer disease problems. For example, Hawaii and Australia flavor cacao breeding programs have started to yield promising results. Joe Whinney of Theo Chocolate is looking at long-term development for flavor growth in Africa, specifically Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which are less developed from a fine flavor standpoint: “We are putting together grafting programs that can allow us to produce some cacao of the highest quality, and there is real incentive for farmers there. Growth opportunities are not in established countries. In the scheme of things, I think in three to five years, you can have a huge impact on one region for the small part of the industry that is fine flavor.”
Dr. Pham Hong Duc Phuoc, director of the Biotechnology Center at Nong Lam University in Vietnam agrees. Vietnam, which has no major disease problems (yet), had no cacao tradition until Phuoc started working on the crop in 1997. He started with some small grafting programs to clone the cacao and increase the quantity. When those programs succeeded, the WCF sponsored larger programs, which provided him with the opportunity to expand all over the country and test cacao’s adaptability to various environments. Today, with the industry established, maintaining plant diversification has become one of the highest concerns in the region. As a result, Phuoc sees widespread benefits from genetic testing to help maintain this diversity. He currently has germplasm of Trinitario, Forastero, and a few Amelonado clones and is experimenting with white Trinitario and other fine flavor clones, especially in the Ben Tre province, beans from which have drawn acclaim from manufacturers worldwide. It is today one of five provinces Marou Chocolate produces fine flavor bean-to-bar chocolate from at origin in Saigon. One of their farmer’s orchard was designated “Heirloom” by the HCP in 2017.
The potential of these flavor programs and the collaborative spirit that now pervades the industry is exactly why people like Steve De Vries are not concerned about losing flavor production in the face of these disease problems and breeding issues. “Listen,” he says, “if you look at the history of cacao, whole countries lose all their production for twenty years but another country comes up. There is always cacao. The important part is that everybody thinks of being in this together. That doesn’t mean everybody has to show his or her undershorts, but the people who share with other people and help build the community will be successful and the ones that don’t, won’t. The more you know and can help people, the more they can help you.”
Meanwhile, there are scientists in the labs looking for solutions in the sequenced genome. For example, professor Mark Guiltinan at Penn State University is studying how genome sequencing accelerates the breeding of disease-resistant plants. As reported in the fall NCA [National Confectioners Association] Journal article “Genomic Breakthrough Speeds Cacao’s Evolution,” Guiltinan and others at Penn State have been researching the quantitative trait loci responsible for things like flavor and immunity in cacao and that have the most influence on the bean. Their work resulted in the discovery of NPR1, a “master regulatory gene” that controls the entire cacao immune system—a huge step in perhaps releasing disease-resistant varieties to the public in the future.
But in South and Central America, the industry needs help right now. There are few places to start anew and escape frosty pod rot and witches’ broom. Breeding new genetic material in the future is essential to preserving and propagating flavor—and providing a higher standard of living for the farmers who grow fine flavor cacao. But farmers cannot wait twenty years for another round of “this seedling should work and might even taste okay.” Thanks to the genetic research of the last few years and the growing collaborative spirit in the industry they may not have to.
While genomic methods and research cannot produce cacao trees that yield fruit in fewer than the typical five to seven years or make the fruit less labor-intensive to harvest, they should be able to help quickly and efficiently breed new trees. Modern genetic tools—specifically marker-driven selection—can help cacao breeders be much more productive, and potentially transform the industry. The tools will not replace the hand pollination, harvesting of the seeds, and planting of 4,000 little bags of soil. But today breeders do not have to wait five years to test the fruit, just two weeks for the seedling to grow some fresh leaves. Then, in a process no different from Brett Beach’s sampling of the mature leaves of that Ancient Criollo in Madagascar, breeders clip pieces from the seedlings’ leaves, tag them, and send them to a lab to extract the DNA. From there, it is an easy process (for scientists, that is) to compare them against the markers or traits the breeders are looking for from the mother or father. And just as important: they can avoid those traits they do not want. Thus, when the seedlings are a month old, breeders will know which three or four of them have all the traits they want. They can immediately grow those out in a greenhouse while they head out to the field and do another cross, because they now have the tools to do a cycle in every crop year. That’s the power of marker-driven selection.
In the fall NCA Journal article, Ed Seguine detailed some of the progress being made at the genetic level and argued that marker-driven selection is an essential step to help cacao remain a desirable business for the growers, with more productive and disease-resistant trees. Ed anticipates that in fifteen years, modern genomic methods will produce “ultra plants with significantly changed yield potential and disease resistance . . . with many more plants at the upper end of yield and disease-resistance potential because of the tools from the genome publishing.” As a result, a four-hectare farm that produced 400 kilograms of cacao on each hectare could produce 4,000 kilograms on just one hectare with noble woods and food crops grown on the others, resulting in a better income for the farmer: “This will dramatically change the economic stability of cocoa farming and create an agricultural business enterprise that looks at the short-, medium-, and long term.”
But how will it taste? Signs are promising. A cup of chocolat chaud might be in order. Flavor has started to play a more prominent role in cacao breeding—not to make over the bulk cacao fields of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana or to create better-tasting super-sized CCN-51s, but to grow sustainable cacao with the potential to make great chocolate.
Prior to this century, a lot of breeding programs focused on “mixing”—trying to bring in markers from as many different cacao types as possible and “pyramid” or stack multiple resistant or trait genes on top of one another. The resulting high-yielding, disease-resistant lines often lost their great flavor traits. In other words, the process bred out the flavor. “When I started working in cocoa, flavor was almost an afterthought in plant breeding programs,” says Dr. Darin Sukha. “You would breed for high-yielding varieties. You breed in disease resistance and good tree habits and then at the end of it all there would be almost a cursory attempt to say, ‘Oh, now let’s make sure it tastes okay.’ Over the last ten years, heightened awareness of flavor as the final expression of cocoa quality has placed flavor testing at the start of the selection process. I am very heartened by this focus on flavor and quality in many breeding programs.”
We have already mentioned some examples of this focus: Dan Pearson propagating Pure Nacional in Peru, Frederick Schilling planting Java Criollo in Java, Joe Whinney grafting in Africa, and Dr. Pham Hong Duc Phuoc’s most recent work in Vietnam. Another example is the USDA-ARS, which has started evaluating its breeding programs with fine flavor in mind. According to Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, this involves looking beyond stacking genes from different types of cacao in the future: “Maybe we should go back to the original population and the original areas where these fine flavors are and stay within a set population to try to find those traits within that population, so that when we do make those crosses, we are not bringing in a lot more differences but maintaining some of those traits. The point is if you’re doing the breeding, I think flavor has to be one of the main traits that we’re constantly looking at, rather than simply saying, ‘I’ve got a great producer that’s going to yield 3,000 kilograms per hectare.’” But, as Gary Guittard cautions, we have to be careful about our biases and open to all possibilities: “We can’t just say, ‘Forasteros are not flavor.’ There are some great Forasteros. I don’t think people realize that the Forasteros have as much individuality, flavor, and history as the Trinitario and Criollo, and could be the foundation of fine flavor in the areas most affected by disease.”
At CATIE, Dr. Wilbert Phillips-Mora started to work on clones with disease-resistant, high-yield, and good-quality components in the late 1990s. Until then, CATIE’s breeding strategy focused on the same qualities most programs did: to identify the sources of resistant beans and to create new material using the traditional breeding strategies—that painfully slow trial-and-error process that can last a generation or more. To save time, Wilbert, who is in charge of the breeding program, “jumped some steps” by making educated decisions based on the perennial data and adjusting quickly to any perceived changes. After around twelve years, once CATIE was successful in identifying and creating a new genotype that had all the desirable markers and traits for superior disease resistance and high yield, it started its research on quality. But even with the latest genetic tools today, producing these crosses or polyclones is a very difficult balancing act, just as it was a decade ago when CATIE started in this direction.
“The world had changed in terms of cacao,” says Wilbert. “Opportunities in our industry for diversity and identification of product for determination of quality traits like high polyphenol content or high fat content were open for exploration. The possibilities for breeding were huge. But the demands for quality were recent. We had that exact same material as forty years ago in most countries. There was no diversity. We had no genome sequenced, poor facilities for the kind of research and analysis required, and poor maintenance of data in the cacao collections worldwide if it was even shared. It was not possible to produce that material to meet the quality demands quickly.”
To transcend these limitations, Wilbert drew on the collaborative spirit and got in touch with different companies around the world that could help carry out the analysis needed and speed things up. These relationships provided CATIE with the opportunity not only to carry out a traditional breeding program, but also to use the latest DNA technology to make rapid progress. CATIE got support from, among others, the World Cocoa Foundation for access to and development of diverse materials and the USDA for planting and collecting information in the field, which would then be sent back to the USDA for molecular analysis. One of the first companies that cooperated with CATIE from the start was the Guittard Chocolate Company, which signed on to do qualitative evaluations of each bean’s flavor potential—a pioneering connection that is now being emulated by Mars and others. “We have to be willing to listen,” says Gary Guittard. “We must try to understand the hybrid area so that we can learn from them and they can learn from us.”
Theo Chocolate, Felchlin, and others later joined Guittard in analyzing the six CATIE clones (all of which are Trinitario type) with the most potential for disease resistance, yield, and quality. After the beans were properly fermented and dried by CATIE, the chocolate manufacturers evaluated them for fat content, aroma, flavor, and color. Guittard found all the beans had good fat content, and all the manufacturers agreed in their evaluations of the flavor profiles, with two of the clones (PMCT 58 and CATIE R1) deemed high quality and two (CATIE R4 and R6), which had much higher disease-resistant traits, found to be very interesting—so interesting that they were selected as two of the ten most important clones at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris.
CATIE then partnered with the Cacao Centro América Project to establish these beans in small clonal gardens in six Central American countries: Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. The goal was to plant the gardens and evaluate how the clones performed in different environments so they might become the source of material for new plantations. Why six clonal gardens across Central America and not just one plantation in Costa Rica? Because fine flavor cacao reacts differently every place it is planted. A tree that grows nicely in the Dominican Republic will have different challenges in other regions. You can’t just take cacao trees and move them someplace with a different altitude or ecology. That’s a path to neither flavor nor ecological sustainability. According to Wilbert, this is the best way to ensure that the cacao will be perennially stable when the material is released to the public: replicate the conditions in which the cacao will be grown. Thanks to the speed available to evaluate new genetic material, local field trials were soon underway in each of those six clonal gardens on thirty new clones eyed for future plantations, many with strong flavor qualities.
The ultimate goal of the Cacao Centro América Project was sustainability for the farmer through cacao that can resist disease, generate high yields, and command a premium price for its flavor—an admirable goal but for now, at least formally, in the past tense. As Wilbert reports, echoing Ed Seguine’s earlier comment about the industry’s focus shifting to supply security and away from a flavor and quality as demand exceeds supply: the funding went elsewhere. “Unfortunately,” Wilbert says. “the Project Cacao Centro América stopped in 2012 because NORAD decided to concentrate funds in Africa. We don´t have the capacity to evaluate the agronomic performance of the materials due to the lack of resources.” But, he adds, there is good news for the future: Most of the clonal gardens are now important sources of germplasm for new plantings available to farmers through the “Catalogue of Cacao Clones Selected by CATIE for Commercial Plantings” but most often passed along farmer-to-farmer. “We are happy because the main goal of the gardens is being reached, but at the same time quite sad because we are losing a very good opportunity to evaluate the materials under contrasting environmental conditions. Perhaps, we can identify a source of financing to carry out this activity in the near future. Due to the good performance of the materials in different localities, we are observing that they are being disseminated by the farmers hand-to-hand in Central America. Consequently, we expect that these clones will become soon an important source of Trinitario cacao in this region. And we hope so because it is not possible to wait. Our farmers urgently need these varieties.”
And scientists like Wilbert and the industry as a whole need the farmers: they are the key to success. In other words, genetics means nothing for the future of fine flavor cacao if no one wants to grow it. Sometimes you have to wonder why anyone would. Cacao is an environmentally sensitive and labor-intensive crop that is susceptible to disease and insects in the best conditions. Half of all cacao production in Central America takes place in the most isolated rural areas and almost all of it is grown on small-scale farms of around two or three hectares and rarely more than five. Even the highest yields often don’t result in a high quality of life for the farmers and their families. Truth is, fine flavor cacao needs to be ecologically and economically sustainable to survive—not only for the crop itself but also for the people who grow it.
That’s why manufacturers have joined the direct cacao movement and have direct buying connections and relationships with the people growing their beans. They realize that paying more for fine flavor cacao is not enough if more money does not go directly to the farmers. And money alone is not enough. They are visiting the farms. They are educating farmers on the postharvest process. They are bringing the farmers chocolate made from their own beans. In this way, the market is less of an abstraction, but a network of relationships that leads to a higher quality of life for everyone. Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, who came to the USDA-ARS from a farm family in Missouri and was a farmer for three years, understands this from the farmers’ viewpoints: “We’re not talking big industrialized guys that can go out and borrow a lot of money to line their fields and put on a lot of fertilizer like we do with crops in the [US] Midwest. These guys for the most part don’t have a lot of money to invest in new inputs. I totally understand how the farmers look at this, and we as an industry have to be more connected to them, especially the fine flavor growers.”
In the end, genetics solves only the first part of the fine flavor puzzle: how to make a potentially great tasting and hearty bean on a tree. Harvest and postharvest—particularly fermentation and drying—is where the work continues and the human touch is essential. Without love for the labor in the fields, chocolate manufacturers’ labors of love to produce the world’s best chocolate would not, in the words of Casablanca, “amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”