Chocolate authenticity test developed

Despite shelling out top dollar for premium chocolate, connoisseurs have historically had no way of determining - aside from their taste buds, of course - whether the chocolate they’re eating is the good stuff, or just a good fake. However, scientists have developed a method to authenticate the varietal purity and origin of cacao beans to ensure that the chocolate inside matches the country of origin labelling outside.

The temptation to cash in on the multibillion-dollar premium chocolate industry leads some unscrupulous souls to adulterate premium cacao beans with lower-quality beans along the supply chain. Researchers can conduct genetic testing to determine the authenticity of other crops such as cereals, fruits, olives, tea and coffee, but these same methods are not suitable for cacao beans.

Along with his team, researcher Dapeng Zhang wanted to address this issue to give consumers greater confidence in the products they’re buying. The team identified a small set of DNA markers called SNPs (and reportedly pronounced “snips”) that comprise the unique ‘fingerprints’ of different cacao species. The technique works on single cacao beans and can be scaled up to handle large samples quickly.

The researchers say the ability to authenticate premium and rare cacao varieties will encourage growers to maintain cacao biodiversity, rather than depend on trees that are most abundant and easiest to grow.

“To our knowledge, this is the first authentication study in cacao using molecular markers,” the researchers said.

The research is described in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.