Latest Chocolá Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Archeologists have long known that cacao was important to the ancient Mayans who used it to make beverages and perform rituals, but some recently discovered evidence shows that these people added cacao to flavor their food as far back as 2,500 years ago. Traces of chocolate that were found on plate fragments could be evidence of a Mayan precursor for modern Mexican dishes like mole, the chocolate-based sauce served with chicken or...

   New cacao types with unique flavors that are distinctly Peruvian have been identified by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists. These new flavors could one day be marketed like wine, by geographical provenance. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists at the agency's Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory (SPCL) and Systematic Mycology and Microbiology Laboratory (SMML), both in Beltsville, Md., and Peruvian collaborators found these new cacao plants during...

Scientists say that as climate change increases, the world's chocolate supply could start to run low. Chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao tree and in recent years demand has risen worldwide. But diseases destroy a third of the world's cacao crop every year, and it's getting worse.Cacao is a rainforest tree with shallow roots that responds poorly to drought, and droughts have hit harvests hard in recent years. However, the biggest chocolate company in the world, Mars Inc., has begun...