Charlene Smith
As if the truth about Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy wasn’t devastating enough, now comes the news that not all chocolate Easter bunnies are chocolate – certainly not the cheap imported ones.
Pity the Easter bunny that used to enjoy a tranquil life on supermarket shelves before being hidden under bushes for children to find. Today he not only has to deal with cheap impostors, but also wars between African cocoa producers and the European Commission.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
When my children were little, the Easter bunny left white footprints that looked like cake-flour impressions across the lawn as he hid chocolate eggs.
At least he was better than Father Christmas, who left sooty footprints on my white wool carpet, which just went to show that he did exist – no mother would dirty her carpet like that.
Father Christmas isn’t really big into chocolates apart from the odd foil-wrapped tree decoration, which is just as well, because the multi-billion-dollar chocolate industry has a somewhat chequered history.
In South Africa, where chocolate still enjoys a relatively quiet life, the Easter bunny will earn chocolate manufacturers about R70-million of a R2-billion-a-year market. Easter and winter are the biggest consumption periods for chocolate in South Africa.
David Jelley, director of chocolate and confectionery at Nestl, said that today it is possible to make chocolate without cocoa beans by using synthetics. Recently a large chain brought some of this “chocolate” on to the market from Zimbabwe and some from Eastern Europe was also being sold.
“The top four manufacturers in South Africa, including Nestl, don’t use more than 5% [non-cocoa] vegetable fats.
“The rest is pure cocoa. We want government to legislate that if there is more vegetable fats used than the 5% limit, it should not be called chocolate,” said Jelley.
His views coincide with those of African producers who are at war with the European Commission, which wants to harmonise rules on the composition of chocolate sold in Europe allowing for a maximum of 5% of non-cocoa fats, but cocoa producers – most of whom are in Africa – say the directive will depress cocoa demand.
The Ivory Coast is leading the resistance to the European Commission rules. Guy-Alain Gauze, the Ivory Coast commodities minister, says his country, which has a $750-million-a-year cocoa industry, would prefer that non- cocoa fats be barred from use in chocolate.
They have reluctantly agreed to the proposal of up to 5% use as long as other conditions are met. These include clear labelling of chocolate noting the quantity of non-cocoa matter and authorising only oils and fats of tropical origin for the manufacture of substitutes. Even though limits have been set at 5% non-cocoa fats, the Ivory Coast believes it will cause a slump in European demand of cocoa beans of up to 200 000 tons and depress world prices by 20%.
This would mean an annual loss of at least $1-billion in foreign earnings to countries exporting to Europe – with nearly all those countries being in Africa.
African producers are also aggrieved because European colonists made them uproot traditional crops such as yams and cassava to make way for crops such as cocoa, tobacco or cotton, making those countries captive to the vagaries of international commodities markets.
Owen Gowar, managing director of Cadbury’s, said there would be no impact on prices in South Africa: “Chocolate recipes as they are will not change much. In South Africa we have taken the view, among the South African Chocolate and Sweet Manufacturers Association, which incorporates all sweet manufacturers, that we will follow the United Kingdom’s compositional standards, or the 5% cocoa butter equivalent.”
Gowar does not believe there will be much impact on world cocoa prices either. He says that chocolate with higher percentages of vegetable oils “looks like chocolate, but has a waxy taste. A lot of Easter products don’t have much real chocolate.”
Nonetheless, Jelley is not opposed to the cheap, waxy version, as long as it is not labelled chocolate. “South African consumers are relatively low users of chocolate.
“At the bottom end of the market, people just don’t have money to buy chocolate, which is why there is a place for non-chocolate.
“There is a lot of stuff from Eastern Europe, called compound chocolate which is made up of more vegetable fat.
“It is about 25% cheaper than the real thing and for those who are not used to real chocolate it tastes good. So there is definitely a market for it.”