Pour Noëlyour chocolat risks being in the image this year 2022: bitter. On the shelves of your favorite supermarket, you may have noticed the greater place given to dark chocolate. With degrees of cocoa sometimes very nervous, like 85, 90, even 99%. In our Franprix in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, Sandrine, the cashier, attests to this: “It’s selling like hot cakes, and it’s going up year following year”. The strategic location of the tablets also attests to this: right in front of the cash registers, in the same rank as Kinder Bueno, sweets and chewing gum, among these “last pleasure purchases before paying”.
We recall the equation for the less nutritionists: the more a chocolate is loaded with cocoa, the more it is bitter, and the less it contains sugar. And even historical recipes follow this trend. This year, Milka – yet milk chocolate – took the plunge following more than 3,000 tests with consumers French and Germans. The new recipe contains 10% cacao more, 5% less sugar. “The biggest change in twenty-five years”, announces the brand. Céline Perollaz, Senior Product Manager France at Milka, says: “Consumer feedback has shown us a trend towards a more intense, cocoa-flavored and lower in sugar taste. Pierre-Louis Desprez, associate director of Kaos Consulting, an innovation consulting firm, explains this change anthropologically: the Western population is aging, and the older you are, the less you tend to consume sucre, even to support it. Who has never had the experience of reliving one of their childhood pleasures in adulthood and finding it too sweet, or having stomach aches followingwards? We get older, and our palate settles down.
sugar hunt
This metabolic change due to the canonical age of Westerners is not the only explanation. Even among the youngest, sugar tends to take off, notes Marie-Eve Laporte, teacher-researcher at the IAE Paris-Sorbonne and specialist in the evolution of eating behavior : “It’s the whole society that goes on the hunt for sugar, not just chocolate. »
First criterion of this demonization, the sanitary aspect “The perception of nutritional risk is growing, the population is more and more sensitive to what it eats and is asking the question of the long-term effects on health”, continues the expert. We no longer stop sugar only for fear of cavities, but also “because of the problems of obesity, much more visible and informed in our time, of cancers…”.
The square of healthy dark chocolate
In 2007, Mars had already changed its recipe in France, in order to adapt to new consumer trends: lighter bars (42 grams instead of 50) and fewer calories (180 kcalories once morest 240 previously). Chocapic cereals have reduced their amount of sugar by 41% between 2003 and 2021: from 42 grams per 100 grams to 24.9. The wisest among you will retort that dark chocolate is as much, if not more, caloric than milk chocolate. Certainly, but the high cocoa content keeps the reputation of an excellent food with nutritionists. We will remember it, since we have you: calories have nothing to do with the nutritional quality or not of a food.
Marie-Eve Laporte sees in it “the fashion for heathly and healthy eating. So less sugar, but also less bad fats and more good foods”. A category to which cocoa belongs, praised for its very good lipids, not to mention its magnesium and other nutritional gems. Here it is propelled to the top of sales thanks to its double effect “to do good in terms of taste and health, two values that we tend to oppose”, ends the expert. Because we’re not going to lie to each other, “heathly” green beans don’t melt so well in the mouth.
It’s the bitter that takes the man
Taste, precisely, it is the other trend that Marie-Eve Laporte analyzes to explain the disgrace of sugar: “The latter is reputed to kill the flavor, and people who consume very sweet products have the image of people without a palate or with regressive tastes. Same observation at Pierre-Louis Desprez: “Chocolatiers wanted to segment their market into age categories, and therefore now make specific ranges for adults in order to gain market share. This explains the rise of dark chocolate and very cocoa. »
The question remains whether too much cocoa does not kill the cocoa, by making the chocolate too bitter – or “intense” in more marketing terms? For Marie-Eve Laporte, it would be a question of growing up and getting up to date: “Bitterness is a taste rejected by babies, which develops with age. It is therefore a taste that is well regarded socially, because it is a sign of a fine palate, which grasps complex things well”. Sign of a real fashion, we also talked regarding the arrival in force of the bitter in this paper on… IPA beer. “This should continue in this direction and increase in the coming years,” warns Marie-Eve Laporte. Come on, it’s time to be an adult.
