Penn State chocolate short course wraps up a sweet summer week

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Walking through Penn State’s University Park campus, you might not know you could be walking by a small chocolate factory.

The facility, located in the Rodney A. Erickson Food Science Building in the College of Agricultural Sciences, can take cacao beans and process them into chocolate bars, and attendees of Penn State’s Chocolate Short Course learned about this “bean-to-bar" chocolate production in a five-day short course this June. Attendees even left with their own 70% Peruvian dark chocolate bars that started as cacao beans.

This year’s course covered cacao bean sourcing; bean and chocolate processing; and the business of chocolate, through both lecture and lab activities. Each day began with lecture sessions in the food science building and ended with hands-on lab experiences on the first floor.

“The course is designed for industrial and craft chocolate makers, as well as people with non-technical duties that could benefit from learning how chocolate is made,” said Greg Ziegler, distinguished professor of food science and co-director of the chocolate short course. “Twenty-one participants attended this year, including chocolate makers from small and large companies, suppliers and equipment manufacturers.”

Nine instructors from both academia and industry taught throughout the week.

In addition to covering the technical process of “bean-to-bar" chocolate making, the course also emphasized food safety and sensory science. Ziegler said incorporating food safety information is important because chocolate manufacturers may not have a background in food safety, which is important even for a stable, dry product like chocolate.

Another subject covered was sensory science, “the scientific discipline that evokes, measures, analyzes and interprets reactions to products as perceived by the human senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing,” according to Helene Hopfer, associate professor of food science and co-director of the short course.

Attendees participated in sensory activities to become more familiar with the procedures, learn from each other and evaluate their own perceptual abilities, said Hopfer.

“Chocolate is often consumed and enjoyed for its flavors,” she said, “and understanding flavor perception and developing skills to discuss smells, tastes and mouthfeels with others and their customers helps businesses to be successful.”

Research was also integrated throughout the course.

“We provide scientific findings and encourage participants to approach their business with a fundamental understanding of the science of chocolate,” said Hopfer. “We also want to show that research is for everyone and that there is a lot of science out there accessible to everyone, one just has to look for it.”

This year, the course was dedicated to the memory of Paul S. Dimick, professor emeritus in the College of Agricultural Sciences who was a chocolate researcher and also developed and directed the original Penn State Chocolate Short Course, said Ziegler. He died earlier this year in May, a month before the course began.

Penn State offered chocolate short courses in the 1990s, when there were only about six primary cacao bean processors, said Ziegler. In 1996, Scharffen Berger Chocolate came on the market, and there was an uptick in craft chocolate makers. The original nine-day chocolate short course paused in 1996, and last year, the Penn State Chocolate Short Course was offered again due to demand for information from craft chocolate makers.

Pennsylvania is positioned uniquely in the chocolate industry due to its large dairy industry and port, said Ziegler. Pier 84 in Philadelphia is a deep-water port that imports about 80-90% of cacao beans that are processed in the U.S., but about 70% of the beans stay and are used in Pennsylvania, according to a 2017 article in the American Journal of Transportation.

When people think of chocolate and Pennsylvania, Hershey may come to mind. But the state is home to multiple large chocolate makers, with M&M Mars, Barry Callebaut, Blommer Chocolate Company, and Cargill — which owns Wilbur Chocolate — all in Pennsylvania.

For Ziegler and Hopfer, the short-course ties directly to Penn State’s land-grant mission, with the course providing important outreach work.

“For me, this is a way for us to take the research we’ve done and get it into the hands of people who could really use it,” Ziegler said. Hopfer explained the course “translates science and research into actionable education and outreach for all citizens. We provide educational outreach and are able to create an impact with our research through this translation.”

The course will be offered again next summer from June 17 to 21. Although largely a similar format, next year’s course will include more information about experimental design so chocolate makers can learn how to do their own research regarding roasting or other processes.

For more information about the Penn State Chocolate Short course, visit the course website or contact Greg Ziegler at grz1@psu.edu. For more chocolate-related research at Penn State, visit the Cacao and Chocolate Research Network.