Big food companies have one thing in common. They have guarded their secret recipe like gold. Colonel Sander's original document for KFC's secret recipe is reported to be in a safe inside a Mission Impossible style motion-detecting vault. Jay Bush of Bush's Baked Beans is the only one who knows its signature spice blends other than their family dog, Duke. The recipe for Coca-Cola is inside an Atlanta bank vault accessible to only two top executives. These are billion dollar secrets of major food industry player and they are willing to trade secrets to save chocolate.
As reported inn Grist, these big food industry players are collaborating to invest in a large research project to save chocolate and they are willing to share the results to the public. These billion dollar companies need to keep cacao plants alive to sell more products. It is said to be a shared gaol.
Cacao plants are reported to make money for everyone, from the biggest multinational corporations to the 6.5 million farmers who grow them in countries like Africa, South America, and Asia. However, these plantations have been plagued with pests and diseases. With the worsening state of climate change, it adds to the threatening shortage of chocolate supply.
In a study conducted about Ghana and Cote d'Ivore which produce almost half of the world's chocolate found that growing areas will decrease quite seriously by 2050 due to a rise in temperature. The group that mapped the cocoa genomes hopes making the sequence public, researchers will be provided with tool for more efficient research and a faster breeding of new cultivars.
The so called pre-competitive research are participated by food companies like Nestle, Kellog and Mars. In 2011, five food industry partners joined together with Netherland's TI Food and Nutrition on a four-year project to study the effects of probiotics in the human gut. In 2010, Mars, IBM and selected number of other companies, nonprofits and academic institutions mapped the cocoa genome. Last September Mars and 60 of its partners unveiled the Global Food Safety Center, a state of the art research facility based in Beijing.
With the collaboration of these billion dollar companies in the food industry, the public can only hope for endless supply of chocolate.
