The confectionery giant has collected 96 varieties and mapped over 300 types of cocoa – the key ingredient for chocolate treats – to ‘futureproof’ our favourite snacks
Nestle is creating a “Noah’s Ark” for cocoa beans to protect favourites like Kit Kat and Quality Street from climate change and disease.
The confectionery giant has collected 96 varieties and mapped over 300 types of cocoa – the key ingredient for chocolate treats – to “futureproof” our favourite snacks.
It has teamed up with scientists from America’s Pennsylvania State University, Swiss choc experts and the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Costa Rica to create the repository. And it has been likened to the Biblical ship that saved one pair of every animal species in the world from an ancient global flood.
Trade journal Food Navigator said the project would “help researchers identify plants with desirable traits, such as climate resilience, disease tolerance and high yield”. It added: “And with big names including Kit Kat, Quality Street and Smarties to its name, it’s vital [that] it can ensure the commodity’s future.”
Head of Nestlé’s Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Jeroen Dijkman, told the journal: “Assembling the world’s genetic diversity of cocoa into a well curated collection, or ‘Noah’s Ark’ of cocoa diversity, not only makes sense from a conservation point of view, it will also allow us to uncover key traits that can be used in traditional breeding programmes to safeguard the future of cocoa.”
Patrick Descombes, the Swiss multinational’s senior expert in genomics, the biology of mapping genomes, added: “Cocoa is a key ingredient in many of our products – especially chocolate. Yet the fact that only a small percentage of global cocoa diversity is currently used in commercial production makes its supply chain more vulnerable to a fast-changing world.
“We leveraged cutting edge genomic techniques, including deep sequencing of cocoa tree genomes, advanced data analysis and bioinformatics, to explore genetic similarities and differences across over 300 cocoa varieties and establish this core collection.”
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