Avoiding Waste and Saving Water with Craft Chocolate

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Despite spending more on chocolate than published books and recorded music (per capita per annum in the UK), we don’t think much about it.

But chocolate is full of surprises. Indeed, it’s a great lens to explore everything from how to minimise food waste to stopping desertification.

Which of the following requires the most water?

• Avocado?
• Banana?
• Snack bag of almonds (25g)?
• Glass of milk?
• Cheese sandwich (125g of cheese)?
• Chocolate bar?

Thanks to some tools developed by Arjen Hoekstra and his Dutch NGO, ‘The Water FootPrint‘, it’s relatively simple to work these out. And it’s fairly eye opening…

To grow cocoa, the tree Theobroma cacao, needs a huge amount of water! But before everyone heads for the exit and vows to give up chocolate, it’s worth looking at another chart:

Chocolate has an extraordinary range of environmental impact… so choose wisely!

Cacao flourishes with rainforest diversity, playing a key role in ‘agroforestry’. Forest canopy provides the shade that Theobroma cacao requires to thrive, and habitat for the pollinators that allow cocoa pods to grow. Agroforestry also reduces the spread of disease and pests, whilst also enhancing soil fertility.

Cacao farming could, and should, be a win-win; it’s why craft chocolate is superior to its mass-produced, commodity equivalent. It not only tastes better, it can stop desertification and deforestation. And it’s better for you, and for farmers.

Chocolate’s Environmental Footprint

Unfortunately, cocoa farmer poverty in West Africa, and a desire to grow high yielding cocoa varieties (like CCN51 in South America) has led to the destruction of rainforests.

For example: Cote D’Ivoire’s forest cover decline from over 30% in 1990 to less than 3% today!

And so rather than water being recycled, as happens naturally in cacao agroforests, water is pulled out of aquifers, increasing droughts and even desertification.

An Alternative Approach

The good news is that craft chocolate makers are well aware of all this danger.

They work with farmers and co-operatives to preserve and protect the rainforest. Indeed the likes of Original Beans, Moka, Chocolarder and Conexión offer schemes whereby they plant forest every time they sell a bar!

“Canary in the Coalmine”

Cacao trees are very thirsty for water, but therefore also highly sensitive to drought and climate change, creating a “doom loop”.

During the 2015/16 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), apart from floods and droughts, Brazilian scientists were horrified to discover a spike in cocoa tree mortality (over 15% year-on-year), a massive decrease in cocoa yield (down by 89%), and a huge increase in the spread of the fungal disease ‘witches’ broom’. They found that these catastrophes were compounded by the loss of forest canopy and diversity in Brazilian “cabrucas” (the traditional cocoa farms) in Bahia, a leading cocoa growing area. The same effects were also seen in Sulawesi, Indonesia during the same season.

Ominously; researchers suggest that cocoa growing regions “could be the ‘canaries in the coalmine’ warning of forthcoming major drought effects”.

Solutions and Approaches

The jury is still out on the many supposedly disease resistant and faster growing hybrids like CCN51, CC81, etc. Though hyped, their attributes are challenged by various studies, and even farmers themselves.

What’s clear though is that programmes to plant these through slash-and-burn agriculture, and monoculture, has led to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and pressure on already strained water levels.

Despite these challenges, ‘big chocolate’ is doubling down on plant breeding programmes: Cocoa geneticists are now trying to engineer cocoa varietals and root stocks that need less water. If they succeed, these new hybrids will (like other GM crops) lead to great sales for the companies who have engineered these “miracles”.

But they don’t address the fundamental ‘problem’; that we need the rainforest. We need its canopy and its diversity, and we can’t carry on pulling water out of the aquifers without creating more deserts and more droughts.

Theobroma cacao comes from the rainforest. It’s evolved to thrive in the humidity and rainfall of tropical forest. It needs the rainforest. And in turn, it helps nourish the rainforest.

Another Means to End Waste

Another great environmental calculator is found in Professor Sarah Bridle’s work on food emissions.

Part of the power and impact from Professor’s Bridle’s work comes from her unique background: Prior to being Professor of Food, Climate and Society at York University, Sarah Bridle was Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology at Manchester. She’s used her skills as mathematician and statistician to do an extraordinary job illustrating how small changes can make a massive difference.

She explains that the average person in the UK generates 6kgs of greenhouse gases every day; the equivalent of 238 party balloons of gas (as much as would fill a small car). She illustrates the typical breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, showing the consequences of our eating habits, and explaining the impact of actions like going vegan or even adding less milk to your tea. She even compares using a microwave to boiling a kettle.

As is to be expected, mass produced chocolate doesn’t come out very well here! On a par with eggs for the average Briton (about 5 party balloons of greenhouse gases per person per day).

But what comes out even worse is food waste. Most of this is made at home, and accounts for 1kg of our 6kgs (or 43 of our 238 party balloons) of greenhouse gas emissions per day.

Professor Bridle does a great job of explaining why, and how, food home waste is so pernicious: Bottom line, it’s not just the wastage, but also the way that the wate is disposed of; landfill. In landfill, the issue is how methane gas is created, and for how long it disperses (at least 20 years).

Bottom line: Avoiding food waste is a critical action, up there with air miles in terms of impact.

A Mea Culpa

We are still struggling with some of the supply chain challenges caused by Brexit and covid.

We specifically had issues importing internationally last year. In many cases, we had orders sitting in warehouses waiting for containers to ship for 3 months! 6 months in a couple of cases!

This means that we’ve now a significant number of great bars that are unfortunately ‘short dated’. And we really, REALLY, don’t want to dispose of them!

We’ll send many to food banks and our ‘Chocs for Docs’ programme. But we’re also making up more ‘lucky dip boxes‘ with bars close to their best-before and use-by dates. It would help us, and the environment, if you’d purchase these boxes.

Don’t let them go to waste. Even though the water’s been recycled, it would be shame to not have the flavours savoured.

To give you some encouragement, we’re also offering a limited-time-only 10% discount offer.

We also still have excess stock of this amazing dark milk chocolate from Luisa Abram. Made from wild cacao, grown on the banks of the Tocantins River in the Amazon, combined with rich creamy milk from Jersey cows, this bar is delicious and indulgent.

It has a ‘short’ expiration date, so to help us avoid wasting any, we’re offering to you at a 30% discount (while stocks last).

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

Spencer

p.s. Next week I’ll be participating in the Chocolate e Cacao Festival in Porto, Portugal. If you’re able to travel, or if you’re already there, it would be lovely to meet you in person!

p.p.s Congratulations to Pump Street Chocolate for winning ‘Best Producer’ at The Observer Food Monthly 2022 Awards!