Taste Matters: The Fine Chocolate Industry Association Announces The Launch Of The Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative

The best tasting chocolates in the world are poised for extinction. As growers continue to remove or replace fine flavor cacao trees with less flavorful, high-yield, disease-resistant cacao hybrids and clones, a world of ordinary flavor dominates the chocolate universe. Connecting genetics to flavor offers an important new way to protect and preserve the finest flavors for future generations. Alas, no genetic initiative has ever focused on flavor first. Until now.

Enter the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative (http://finechocolateindustry.org), a partnership between the Fine Chocolate Industry Association (FCIA) and the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) to create the first-ever genotype map with a focus on flavor cacao trees.

The Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative (HCP) will connect everyone with a stake in the future of fine flavor chocolate to a very specific set of goals:
- To know where the world's finest flavor beans are,
- To tie their flavor to the genetics; and ultimately,
- To help ensure cacao quality and diversity, and preserve and propagate fine flavor beans for future generations.

"Preservation is necessary now more than ever," says Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, the USDA-ARS Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory research leader. "It is not just the less-flavorful cacao hybrids and clones but also cattle, soy, pineapples, and other crops that are replacing the most flavorful cacao trees. If we can't identify, preserve, and protect these flavors, they will be lost forever."

The idea for the HCP initiative emerged in 2010 when FCIA representatives met with Dr. Meinhardt and Dr. Dapeng Zhang of the USDA-ARS. Dr. Meinhardt thought the USDA-ARS lab could help the FCIA identify fine flavor cacao using the samples in the existing worldwide database. Shared concern led to instant action: the FCIA got its members on board, and in December 2011, the FCIA established a specific cooperative agreement with the USDA-ARS to develop their ideas further. More than two-dozen chocolate companies and industry stakeholders, both large and small, then stepped up to provide funding in 2012 as Founding Circle members, allowing the HCP to officially launch in June 2012 and move forward.

The HCP welcomes any beans to be submitted and evaluated for their flavor, but not every bean will be identified as "heirloom." "First of all, it has got to taste good," says Dan Pearson, chief executive officer of Maranon Chocolate and FCIA board member, who helped develop the HCP. "Can taste be objective like genetics? No. But genetics alone say nothing about flavor. Strong genetic origin may have the potential to yield the best flavor, but genetic identification itself simply reveals what a bean is, not whether it is really yummy. That's about classification. That's the second step. If it doesn't taste good, we are not going to proceed with the genetics."

In other words, flavor comes first, which is why the FCIA chose the word "heirloom" and its basic Webster's definition-"a cultivar of a vegetable or fruit that is open-pollinated and is not grown widely for commercial purposes [and] often exhibits a distinctive characteristic such as superior flavor or unusual coloration"-to frame the HCP.

"The HCP is looking for flavor the old-fashioned way: taste," adds Gary Guittard of the Guittard Chocolate Company, the oldest family-owned and operated chocolate company in the United States and an FCIA founding member. "The HCP evaluation process starts objectively with bean samples anonymously and uniformly processed into chocolate. Using gas chromatography the USDA-ARS will then measure and record the flavor profiles for those beans. But the next and decisive s