Amateur innovators can some time throw the traditionally accepted technological truths upside down as reflected by a recent report that some one in the UK has created "chocolate" products with a caloric content of only 20 kC per bar! Can this be really true? When popular media flashes such explosive news, consumers get highly excited! A careful scrutiny of the claim by this chocolate entrepreneur reveals that, unlike the standard chocolates familiar to the consumers, the new product contains high moisture which may not pass the test of identity for chocolates accepted universally. It is fashionable these days for the industry to propagate food products containing less and less of sugar, fat and salt though most such products fail to live up to the billing. The new low calories chocolate also may fall under this category and once commercial production and promotion start, the real problems will emerge. Here is a take on this new development.
"London-based Aneesh Popat's recipe ditches high-calorie ingredients such as butter, cream and eggs. Instead, 25-year-old Popat, a maths graduate, combines flavour-infused water with cocoa to create The Chocolatier, which contain as little as 20 calories a bar, 'The Daily Express' reported. Popat claims his chocolate is as tasty as sugar-packed rivals and comes in flavours from fizzy cola and strawberry mint to chai tea and apple pie. "If everything in the world was made of chocolate I'd have eaten it by now. My love of chocolate led me to devote and apply my mathematical and scientific backgrounds to create the most unique flavour combinations with utmost precision and creativity," he said. "Chocolate is good for you if made in the right way," he said. Popat's low-fat chocolates are already taking the culinary world by storm. After support from thousands of visitors to his stall at the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham, he is hoping his chocolate will hit the open market. It is already supplied to Michelin star restaurant Apicius in Cranbrook, Kent, and five star hotel Le Meridien in London".
Reducing sugar and fat are laudable objectives provided the product features are not grossly distorted and the new chocolate products probably will never be universally accepted no matter what health claims are trumpeted. One has to only look at the ice cream industry which has been in business since ages and the basic identity of this yummy product has never been seriously compromised in spite of the fact it is rich in sugar and fat! Of course there are imitative ice cream products like frozen yogurts, gelato etc which probably gives same culinary pleasure, as that given by true ice cream products, for those who want to control the ingestion of sugar and fat. Therefore the new 'chocolate" product, as claimed by the above entrepreneur, can be easily positioned as another chocolate like product and may as well click, provided it has a reasonablu good shelf life.
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