Hershey's Chocolate Research
The Hershey Company spends many dollars every year in research and development along with looking at trends that will continue beyond a mere novelty. Like all smart and successful businesses they look for ways to stay at the cutting edge. Hershey is truly a great American chocolate company and to see their research is always insightful.
One chocolate trend that seems to be much more then a trend but rather an expectation and realization of all chocolate, is the increasing / concentrating or maintaining cocoa antioxidants in a chocolate. It is like the current health conscious popularity of concentrating resveratrol from red grape skins and then placing it back into grape juice or other drinks.
The problem is when cocoa beans are heavily fermented or processed they start to lose their natural cocoa antioxidant value. There are many ways of keeping the antioxidant value in chocolate or cocoa, but the good people over at Hershey mentioned an exclusively patented way of doing it. In addition to possibly keeping the natural Hershey cocoa antioxidant value high, an added benefit is a red color.
Hershey achieves this goal using underfermented or unfermented cocoa beans that are treated with an acid composition. The acid treatment is used in place of the dutch process or alkalization of the cocoa beans. As a result a distinct red hue develops while levels of cocoa antioxidants are maintained and/or developed. This clever method was invented by the very smart and well respected expert Hershey engineers Holmgren, Miller Stuart and Wang.