When cocoa beans or rye grains are treated in the same way, their taste begins to approach each other.
You can’t always trust your sense of taste. Adobe Stock / AOP
In the summer, a product appeared on candy shelves that looked like an ordinary chocolate bar, but whose product description revealed a surprise.
The bar in question was not a chocolate bar at all, because it was made of cocoa. The Raspberry Dream snack bar contained malted rye instead of cocoa. Ten percent of the mass of the bar was malted rye.
It was Fazer’s first cocoa-free bar produced on an industrial scale.
The development of such products is almost necessary, because growing cocoa is increasingly difficult due to climate change and increasingly long periods of drought, but people’s desire to have good things that taste like chocolate is only growing.
Rye rises
A taste similar to chocolate can be obtained from rye.
– The flavor profile of fermented rye and cocoa is similar, says the director of communications Liisa Eerola From Fazer.
The cocoa beans used in chocolate are also fermented.
Eerola believes that in the future, fermented rye will be used more and more to replace the cocoa used in chocolate-flavored products.
– It is completely possible! Rye will definitely rise, says Eerola.
At the moment, there are no Fazer bars containing fermented rye for sale in stores, but the situation is temporary, according to Eerola. The next product containing fermented rye is still a big secret.
– There will be something new in this field next year, but I can’t say more precisely yet, says Eerola.