Get ready for the chocolate wars

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- While U.S. food companies mutter over the implications of the Food and Drug Administration's requirement that by 2006 partially hydrogenated vegetable oils be listed on all nutritional labels, the British are grumbling over a similar classification directive from the European Union. This one requires the labeling on their mass production chocolate, a highly sweetened confectionery European chocolatiers believe is not worthy of the name.

The U.S. should watch closely. Nutritionists may target U.S. mass production-chocolate next.

Americans ate 3.1 billion pounds of it in 2001 -- $8.5 billion worth, a rise in consumption, cautioned the Center for Science in the Public Interest, of 50 percent. Americans need chocolate, they objected with this quirky remark, "like they need pats of butter to swallow between meals."

It's hard to imagine how a pat of butter can bring the same satisfaction as a cube of chocolate. But fat content in chocolate is at the heart of the directive from Brussels.

It decrees that no more than 5 percent of vegetable fats other than cocoa butter is permitted. This is devastating to Britain's mass producers of chocolate. British milk chocolate contains more milk, less cocoa and, to disguise this lack, more sugar than European chocolate. And it isn't made with as much cocoa butter.

Good chocolate contains between 55 and 75 percent cocoa butter. But cocoa butter is a valuable and expensive commodity. It isn't simply crucial in defining the difference in taste and mouth feel between a good and an indifferent chocolate. It is also vital to a quite separate market, cosmetics. Chocolate mass-manufacturers can profit from selling off their cocoa butter to make-up and body lotion producers, then replace the deficit with vegetable fats. A greasy coating left in the mouth is the result, with a high sugar content of mass-produced chocolates disguising the loss of flavor and texture.

Europe's makers of fine chocolates -- the Belgians, the Swiss, the Germans, French and Italians -- are anxious to protect the quality reputation of their own product. They heartily object to the inferior, to them, English confection being permitted to call itself by the same name when the same standard of ingredients is not involved in its making.

After much to-ing and fro-ing between the government and chocolate behemoths Cadbury, Masterfoods and Nestlë Rowntree, which have between a 25 percent and 27 percent share of a market worth $5.77 billion (£3.5 billion), the EU demands were written in August into the Cocoa and Chocolate Products Regulation 2003.

Now, if British manufacturers add up to a maximum of the much cheaper 5 percent vegetable fat, they must confess to it on the label. The percentage of cocoa solids contained must also be listed.

This labeling adjustment is acceptable only so long as the chocolate concerned is sold to the confectionery heathens of the British Isles. All British mass-manufactured chocolate destined for export may now only be described as "family milk chocolate," which suggests it is to a block of Lindt chocolate as Diet Pepsi is to a bottle of Moët & Chandon.

The BCCCA, the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Alliance, the UK trade association, estimates there are around 140 producers in the UK chocolate market, most of which are small "boutique" confectioners working to a level of quality equal to their European counterparts.

Helen and Simon Pattinson, young ex-lawyers, are among them. Just under two years ago they set up Montezuma's Chocolates (www.montezumas.co.uk for overseas orders) in the bucolic English county of Sussex, and now have three stores. The Europeans would approve of their product. Their chocolates are made from organic cocoa beans from the Dominican Republic and GM-free ingredients, and wrapped in re-cycled paper or materials that can be used again by the customer.

Their range is highly unusual. The Chilli & Dark Chocolate Bar, the Milk Chocolate & Geranium Disks and Montezuma's Very Dark Chocolate all have won Britain's Organic Food Awards and Great Taste Awards. Montezuma's Revenge is a dark chocolate truffle with chili, tequila and lime. Bergamot, more familiar as the flavor of Earl Grey Tea, is only one infusion they use. Others are geranium, cardamom, cinnamon, peppermint, orange and more. You can create your own kilo bar of dark, milk or white chocolate to order, adding extras, like hazelnuts, lemon peel, and various flavor infusions.

Well-made chocolate may initially be expensive. But, without the extra sugar that goes into cheaper varieties to disguise a low cocoa solids content, it is satisfying enough that a little will go a long way. That can't be of comfort to mass chocolate manufacturers who will now be required to reveal just what does -- or doesn't -- go into their own confections.