Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about the deep but tenuous connection between physics and chocolate.
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Hey Daniel, we will know you like chocolate, but is that a personal or a professional interest?
You know, I don't think I know where to draw the line anymore.
I mean between your personal and professional interests.
Sometimes it's all just a big mush.
Well, you're paid to do physics, but are you paid to eat chocolate?
No, I still have to pay for my own chocolate. It's not yet stocked in the department office supply. I mean, I've checked.
So chocolate is personal, then it's not necessary to eat it to do physics.
You know, this is an excellent question, and I'm going to raise that with my department chair because I think it is essential.
You're going to get a chocolate chair for your office.
I want my chair dipped in chocolate.
There you go, that's going to be great on your pants.
Who wears pants in their office?
Hey, that's a personal choice, man, not a professional one, unless you're in a certain profession.
See the line can be fuzzy.
Hi.
I am Horhem, a cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I definitely consume chocolate to do physics.
Really, Like, before you sit down to do any math or work out any physics scenarios or experiments, you have to eat a bar of chocolate.
No, it's not as tightly corelated as like drinking coffee to think hard. But you know, I consume a fair amount of chocolate every week, and I do a fair amount of physics every week, and so there's definitely some in out relationship there.
I see there's a correlation, but who knows what the causation.
Is who it could be the physics leads to chocolate instead of chocolate leads to physics.
What sounds like the physics is financing your chocolate addiction.
That's definitely true, yes, that in this podcast.
But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart Radio.
In which we invite you along on an exploration of everything in the universe. The black holes, the quantum particles, the mysterious chocolate habits of physics professors. Everything out there is up for understanding and therefore grist for explanation.
That's right, because it is a delicious, silky smooth universe out there, full of mysteries, flavors and a nuances that are still up for debait and still up for exploration and asking questions.
And some of the most amazing and mysterious experiences in our lives do come down to the microscopic science, the physics or even gasp, the chemistry of your food determines what it feels like and what it tastes like in your mouth.
That's right. Science is all around us in the physics of our presence here on the planet. There's chemistry and the foods we eat, and there's psychology in things like chocolate addiction.
Chocolate addiction, what I could stop any time?
Sure you can, Daniel, Sure, that's what they all say.
I mean, I'm not going to prove it, but I know I could.
You're not gonna like it, but you could. You're saying like you're gonna go into withdrawal and get the shakes, but you can still do it exactly.
And regular listeners of the podcast might have picked up on the fact that we're often making jokes about chocolate, connecting chocolate with physics, connecting physics with chocolate. But I'm a believer that there's more than just a few jokes to be had here, that there is a deep connection between physics and chocolate.
Isn't there a graph you can find online of like number of Nobel prizes per country versus amount of chocolate consumed.
Yes, indeed, there is an amazing correlation between the Nobel prizes per capita and the pounds of dark chocolate consumed per capita. It's really pretty tight. Switzerland is definitely the upper edge of both of those categories.
But of course I could just be a coincidence, right, because the Swiss love their chocolate, and the Swiss are the ones that issued the mobile prize.
No, those are the Swedes. Man the Swedes oh the sweets, Oh boy, whoops? But close, I guess kind of. They're both European.
Yeah, there you go, central er.
I think the Swedes are also up there. So maybe it's a Swedish Swiss cabal that's behind all of it.
Well, the question then, is is it a correlation or a causation? In which direction is the causation?
Right?
Yeah? Or maybe this another confounding factor that fuels them both. Who knows? One of the deep mysteries of the universe.
This sounds like you're just throwing your hands up in the air. Daniel.
Here, I've embracing the mystery.
She need you apply for a grant to study this or something.
I think I'm gonna go have some chocolate and think deeply about it.
Yeah, there you go. But how are you going to pay for that chocolate?
Okay, I'm applying for a grant? Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Applied to the National Snack Foundation the NSF. But yeah, like you said, there is a chemistry everywhere, and physics within chemistry all around us. Even in the foods we eat. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the physics of chocolate.
There's definitely a physics of chocolate in the experience of eating it, but chocolate also plays other outsized roles in physics. We use chocolate for analogies all the time. Physicists definitely eat a lot of chocolate. You can actually even use chocolate to do physics experiments.
Now, hold on, I feel like you just made a statement there, which is that all physicists eat a lot of chocolate. Is that just based on your experiment of one with yourself, or is there really like a culture of chocolate within the physics world.
You know, I anticipated you challenging me on this, and so I did a bit of research. I was able to dig up how much Americans eat in terms of chocolate per week. On average, Americans eat three chocolate bars per week, spending one hundred and twenty billion dollars a year on this stuff. But I wasn't able to find eddy data on how much chocolate physicists consume. I mean, I have my own observations. I know the physicists or lovers of coffee and coffee chocolate often connected and people are often having little squares of chocolate when they sit there coffee. But yes, I will admit at this point it's basically anecdotal.
I see. So when you said I did some research, you mean you actually didn't do any research.
I mean I ate some chocolate. I thought about it. That's research.
Yeah, that's what I mean. Did some research with an end of one, like one data point.
I watched people in my department eating chocolate. That's end of like five or ten.
Well, you would have to do a controlled experiment like good at the math department, go to the chemistry department, go to the sociology department, and then measure the chocolate consumption per professor.
Yeah, you just outlined my proposal to the National Snack Foundation.
Yeah, there you go. Do I get to be a co author and thus a recipient of the money.
Yeah? Sure absolutely. If I get money from the National Snack Foundation, we'll share it for this study.
All right, But I don't have to use it by chocolate, d egg or what if I use it buy white chocolate, thus canceling out God.
You know, they have pretty strict controls on how you spend government money. So as long as you can stand for Congress and defend that as a valid way to spend public funds. Then hey, let's do it.
Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, well, I hear the National Snack Foundation gets into trouble all the time with that. But yeah, it's interesting to think about. You know, everything that we eat basically has chemistry and does physics in it. Right, there's science and then everything we do and everything we are and everything we put down our stomachs and everything that comes out the other head.
That's right, the chocolate that goes in in the dark, matter that comes out.
Well, you mentioned that there's some experiments you can do with chocolate. What do you mean by that?
This is sort of famous at home measurement of the speed of light that you can do using a bar of chocolate. You take a bar of chocolate and you put it in the microwave, and you'll notice that certain spots on it melt faster than others. Those are because of the microwaves, which are actually just invisible light waves are heating some parts of the chocolate more than others because of the wavelike nature of light. So you can use that to measure the wavelength of the light and then knowing the frequency already, you can derive the speed of light, so you can kind of measure the speed of light using chocolate and a microwave.
Wait, what is this like a real experiment you can do?
This is a real experiment you can do. You can google it and find instructions online. You put the microwave in the chocolate and you'll notice some melty spots here and there. Measure the distance between them, and you get basically the wavelength of the microwaves. You can convert that into the speed of light.
But do you have to disable the rotating table?
Yeah, exactly, you can't let it rotate m.
And Thankfually, you don't need a chocolate for these. You can use a butter or maybe wax. Right, No, you need to do chocolate. Oh, you're absolutely right. You don't need chocolate. It's just kind of fun. You just can do it with chocolate.
Well, at the end of the chocolate version experiment, you have a nice, warm, melty bar of chocolate. The end of the wax version, you don't have any snacks.
Mm, but you only have a few warm pools of chocolate.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You have a pattern of melted chocolate well, what are we doing in this episode? We're talking about the physics of chocolate, the signs behind chocolate.
We're going to do both. We are going to talk to an ex physicist who has done a deep dive on the process of chocolate, reading research papers and going from dirt to bar, growing his own chocolate pods and making his own chocolate bar in his lab, and also talk to experts in commercial production of chocolate. What are the tricky bits of the process, what's hard about making an eminem taste the same all the world around? And why does Hershey's have that particular kind of flavor?
Mmm?
Interesting? All right, Well, let's take a big dip into this fondue of chocolate physics, starting with Daniel's interview with ex physicist Seamus Likely.
Seamus grew up in New Mexico as I did, has a PhD in particle physics like I do, worked at Formulab just like I did, and there are stories diverge. He went off into an industry where he created the Xbox, and more recently he's been well known online for scraping the insides of ancient Egyptian vessels to cultivate yeast and bake ancient bread. Okay, so then it's my great pleasure to welcome the podcast the Infamous, the one and only Seamus Blackly. Seamus, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having me man. You know, I wanted to give an introduction to the listeners, had an idea of who we were talking to here, but it was just such an overwhelming process to try to sketch your background. It's really incredible. So can you give us like a brief summary of how you got to here today to a place where we're talking about nerding out about chocolate details.
You know, people always say that now when they're talking to me or trying to introduce me at things, and it's confusing to me because from my standpoint, you know, I'm bored all the time, and so none of this seems very interesting to.
Me at all.
But perhaps that's why I've had the good luck to do all sorts of different things, because I guess I get bored very easily, and I'm very interested in how everything works. But the long and short of it, and I think specifically from the standpoint of you know, the most important thing we share in common, which is physics, is that I grew up in New Mexico. I thought I was going to be a musician, and at some point I realized that all of the jazz piano guys, which is what I was, who were really respected, who played the best, were like still living with their.
Mothers when they were in their forties. And that was cool.
I mean, there were really amazing people, and I don't mean to cast aspersions on them, but I realized that I couldn't do that, and so I had to figure out something else to do. And it turned out at that I was an undergraduate and I had burned through two years, and I had to find something else that I could study that might make me some money. And I guess the idea that physics would be a career that would make you money. I mean, yeah, sure, but probably more than jazz piano at the time, and well, the only majors available you could do in two years without some kind of maze of prerequisites that would be impossible were basically physics and math at the time, and the physics department at Tufts were I went to school, was filled with all of these really cool guys doing experimental hyenergy physics and phenomenologists, and a couple of theorists, and they were all like Vietnam draft dodgers who went into physics to go to graduate school and.
Not go to Vietnam.
And they were, you know, like touching the face of God to be frank, I mean, they were trying to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. And in my mind, the work felt the same as jazz, and I just kind of stepped through that door and was suddenly, you know, at formula.
It's fascinating to me that you grew up in northern New Mexico near two national labs, but didn't really discover your passion for physics until you left and went to Boston.
Well, yeah, and I had, interestingly, you know, in high school has really focused on music and musical theater and all this stuff. So yeah, and I think that the nature of New Mexico as being such an incredibly bizarre, fascinating, beautiful, creative and technical place it was important in all of this for me in any case. So I go to Fermu Lab and you know, I'm setting up postdocs, and I go to graduate school and I find something in the Magnet Accelerator Physics group for the super condutting super collider that looks great, and then Congress cancels the super collider, and there's a big politics thing around the top Quark, and all these things sort of combined together to cause me to be very unhappy, and so I bailed out and went and took a job designing airplanes that didn't quite materialize. So I had a temporary job doing a thing nobody had ever heard of before, which was writing physics for video games, which was not even a thing, And suddenly I was in the video game business, and you know, it was so exciting and wonderful to be around, working with the people and contributing to the beginnings of what is now you know, video games, like three dimensional video games and three D rendering, and you know, like my variable names and the stuff are still used in all those engines because I was just around at the right time, like a guy looking for the men's room right who walks in the wrong room, and then that's where I was.
And well certainly right place, right time, with the right skills as well.
I mean, it was still fairly awkward to tell people you worked in video games, because it hadn't occurred to most people yet that video games were made by people. I mean, it sounds odd, but it's not like it is now. So so I did that for a long time and that led to me trying to make a big magnum opus game at a new company called DreamWorks, where I was like, you know, the eightieth employee or something, and you know, just biting off more than I could chew and failing at that. You know, and I worked for Steven Spielberg and I knew all these guys, and again, you know, the typical for me, I was just sort of walking through this place thinking, wow, okay, of course everybody hangs out with Steven Spielberg, and it wasn't really you know, the work you're doing. This is such a physicist thing, Like the work you're doing is so hard that everything else kind of seems peripheral and it's not like you're sleepwalking. But I know, it's really aggravating for people around you because they don't see the thing in your mind that you're working on. They don't see the kind of you know, infinite landscape of thought that you have going on all the time. So you just seem like a space kit it and you're not paying attention. But it's quite the opposite, right, So that's what games was like then, because we were figuring out, hey, what is a renderer?
Like?
What like, how do you how would you what when you go through a door? How do you deal with that in memory? Because we have four megabytes and you know, this kind of stuff. And anyway, my big game there it failed because I was, you know, working with a bunch of movie people who didn't get it, and I was, you know, twenty seven or twenty eight or something, and I feel like I probably wasn't even toilet trained, you know, I was really so young. And that huge failure led to me going to try to hide out at Microsoft because I had met Bill Gates again sleepwalking through all this stuff, and he had said, based on some of the physics demos that he saw that we were doing, and you know, locomotion physics that we'd done with dinosaurs and humans and all this, that I should come work at Microsoft someday. And so I sort of sheepishly mailed him, and then I ended up working at Microsoft, and then couldn't help myself when I realized that Microsoft could you know, could make a game console that could beat Sony and et cetera, et cetera. So I just keep on, you know, looking at seeing interesting stuff to work on, and I, for some reason don't have the common sense that most people have about well that's really stupid. You're gonna lose your house. I just go ahead and do it anyway.
So there you go.
And so now we end up with you know, me doing you know, another secret project that I can't tell you about.
Right now, and and and a lot of hobby projects that I talk about.
A lot, like the ancient Egyptian bakery, which I believe it or not, you know, we're now I think, going to.
Build in Cairo, and this chocolate stuff.
Well, you know, I talk a lot in the podcast about teaching people to think like a physicist, you know, which is not to use your common sense, but to follow your curiosity and your intuition and try to make sense of the world and to you know, think differently. And I think that's something we definitely should cultivate. And so maybe you're training as a physicist is what helped you follow your curiosity and end up in all these exciting adventures.
This is I think probably universally true about all human endeavor has come from someone following that curiosity and and doing, as Pendulette says, you know, an amount of work on something that most people would consider insane, right, you know, he says, that's what magic is, Right, Magic is somebody working on something, you know, in a way that most people consider to be insane. But that's truly what, like everything, all human progress, like every story you read about anything important, beautiful, world changing, you know, always has an element of an individual or group of individuals who are working on it despite all indications that it's insane, and following that. And I think that within physics we need more of that because sometimes you get to see a secret and you're not going to see that secret unless you open yourself to being compelled to just following that curiosity despite every practical concern And it's weird, because you are a physical being. You have to have practical concerns. You have to eat, you have to have relationships you know you don't want to have, like Feimen's second wife's divorce papers saying all he thinks about is calculus. But also, I mean all I think about is calculus. I mean that's like, it's just how it is, because sometimes you know, it turns up a gold nugget man. So that's so important. It's really, really, really important. And I mean to get back around a chocolate That's where the chocolate comes from, is the musing of how strange is it that dirt can produce this chocolate bar? And you know, could we do that? We could try. Let's try. Let's see what it's like, because it'll just be a thing we do in the background. I'll take years for the tree to grow. Let's just see if we cannot kill the tree.
But why chocolate specifically? I mean, were you trying to develop a useful skill so you can create something valuable in the end times? Or do you think it's a deep physics chocolate connection. It's chocolate. What else do you need? I mean, all right, so let's get to chocolate. Then, can you walk us through the process, because I know you did a deep dive into the research of how to go from dirt to bar. Walk us through every stage of the process of how you grow this thing, how you ferment it, how you roasted. What are all the secrets there that humanity has slowly discovered over thousands of years.
It's impressive, kind of in the same vein as coffee and I was thinking about coffee because I did grow coffee also years ago, and it's just so interesting that we would, you know, cultivate these plants because they had a stimulant in them, and everybody knew that had stimulant.
So it's like tea. You cultivate these plants and they make these little red berries.
I don't know if you've ever seen coffee berries on a tree, and then you harvest them when they're red, and then you throw away the fruit, and you keep the seed okay, fair enough, and then you dry the seeds, and then you roast the seeds, and then you grind the seeds, and then you boil the seeds, and then you also throw the seeds away and you drink the water. That's insane, nobody would think of that, And so there's some kind of evolutionary process in there that's very lucky. And part of what you wonder is if that is the optimal way to enjoy the coffee bean or not, or if it's merely habitual. And you know, there are many coffee traditions, but they all basically follow that same extraction principle, and it is a biological extraction, right, I mean, it's a biology lab kind of a process. But the biology lab process probably came from people understanding that type of extraction and applying it elsewhere. So the question is how it fits together, And that's a little bit of the motivation or chocolate. So, as I said, in my lab, we have space and temperature control and some humidity from a water jetta, a machine that cuts difficult stuff using high pressure water. It has a big water tank and so there's always a kind of humid environment around it. So we had accidentally grown some plants around it just for some cheer, or actually we had a contest to see how big a tomato plant we could grow, and in this environment, this little tomato ceiling in six or seven months, you know, grew like twenty five feet to the ceiling and was winding out onto the ceiling. So we thought, all right, well, this is a great growing environment. What's the most interesting thing we could grow? And you know, chocolate is probably the weirdest and most interesting thing you could grow. Because I don't think intuitively, at least for me, I didn't think about chocolate as being a plant. You know, what is it as a petroleum product? Like, what does it come from and so we you know, got some seeds and planted them and they sprouted, and then we had a few years of you know, just happily, you know, figuring out how to not kill them. And you know it had to do with soil acidity and such, and there are papers you can read. So we kind of you know, did the classic nerd thing, which is to look to the literature. And it's kind of scant for for cacaw and chocolate actually, and part of that is because the industry could be kind of kind of secretive, like a lot of industries. And part of it is because in the places where cacao grows, it's kind of weed like. And so the idea of you know, nutrition of cacao plants is you know, an absurd kind of a study given the fact that the chocolate industry is real problem is like child slavery. So and the reason there's child slavery is the plants grow around anywhere, and so the economics are around harvesting and moving the product around, not around optimizing for growth. Anyway, we're nerds, so we're optimizing for growth. And we got these beautiful trees and they started to flower, and we're thinking all right, well, we have no idea if these things are self fertile or not, you know, and these are indoors, so we're not going to introduce a bunch of you know, pollinators in here, so let's hope. So we waited a really long time, and yeah, they're not self fertile. And we you know, we have a day job too and other projects.
So meaning that you're wondering if like one flower can fertilize another flower, or if you need a whole separate plant to have some basically cacao sex.
We have microbiologists and other people with a background of biology in our staff, so there was a time, you know, there was some debate about this at lunchtime, and then finally we looked up the literature and realized that not only are they not self fertile, but they need to be fertilized by trees that are preferably, you know, somewhat genetically distant from themselves. And the preferred pollinators is a certain kind of biting gnat that lives only in these environments where the trees come from, and so that was not good news. So we then started a program of learning how to you pollinate these things by hand.
You couldn't just go on like Coco Tinder and look up a matching tree, you know, put them on a date and to hope that hope it works out.
Unfortunately, that's not not there yet. But it's a good business idea for your game, So go for that.
That's my next side project.
But you know, interestingly, if you if you if you actually look up online, there's a there's not a lot of information that's particularly helpful if you actually have trees and you don't know what to do with them, because everybody who has trees already knows what to do with them, which is just leave them and their fruit appears. You know, we feel like we're the only people in the world who like have these trees without the pollinator around. Okay, so we, you know, get out microscopes and the electron microscope and we start looking at the pollen and the different parts and the structures in the in the flowers. We have three trees now because we know we need genetic diversity. The flowers are slightly different. We identify the parts, we tried different strategies and schedules for pollination, and we start getting flowers that that will create fruit. We start, we get a little fruit, and then the fruit falls off, and we learn a little bit more about when to pollinate. We learn a little bit more about about care and feeding, and we get fruit that sticks. And now we have a bunch of pods growing on trees, and we realize we have another problem, which is that we have no idea what to do next. You know, how do you know when these things are ripe?
What do you do?
And so again, you know, you look to the internet and there's really you know, there's a lot of information that plenty of people take a tour of a cacao farm and see the fermentation and the drawing and all these things. And there are lots of videos like you know, like travel promo videos or like you know, Starbucks promotional type videos of like you know, the the cute indigenous people like you know, mixing the beans with their feet in all this, but there's nothing like here's a fermentation schedule. So again we looked at the literature and discover again, you know, not as much as you would want, but there are some good studies of cacw fermentation, which seems like the most relevant. Next thing we need to learn unfortunately. Fermentation is something that I know a great deal about from all of the you know, ancient bread projects and other types of wild beast collection and stuff.
I mean, fermentation is basically helpful rotting, right, It's like microbial processing of your gunk into other kinds of gunk.
Yeah, it's it's it's nanomachinery at your command. And so it's primarily a yeast based fermentation that then becomes a bacterial fermentation. You can tell because of the temperature profile and timing and the the off gassing that happens during CACW fermentation. And it's really an art form more than a science and studied some but all the papers are from you know, agriculture research stations, and so they're not really you know, it's not the kind of paper that you would look at and think this is really good, well controlled data. But it's enough of a hint that we felt we could figure it out, and so we did a couple of things.
But I think it's worth pausing there and noting like a lot of this knowledge obviously wasn't developed using what we would consider to be modern scientific empirical studies. Right. It's like thousands of years of people accidentally doing stuff and discovering oh look what happens? Right, This is like a random walk through through possibility space.
Yeah, and look, I mean I think this is the perfect example of the mind of a physicist in the sense that you know, this is really a deeply kind of artful thing with a lot of feel in it, and if you're going to bring a scientific process to it, you need to bring that scientific process to it in an open way, in a way where you're paying it attention to what's going on. And I think that this is really the difference between like physics and engineering is like, you know, I have a book project that's given me the opportunity or the excuse to read, you know, like all of Heisenberg's papers and and Rutherford and you know in his lab and you know, finding the neutron and the thought process that those guys had. It's it's the perfect analogy here. It's that you know, you cannot overpower this, you cannot brute force this. They didn't have the equipment to do that, so they had to just pay attention. They had to surf along with nature. They had to see what she would give up. Very careful, very thoughtful, and the rigor of your process isn't about like scorched earth colonization of ideas into engineering principles to be put into a book. The rigor of your approach is your own discipline in senning well and really seeing what's happening right, and then that can give you a useful tool and model that you can use then to understand and then to predict. Perhaps, so that's what we tried to do. You know, all of these people who talk about being to bar and all of these chocolate people who you know, have their artisanal chocolate and curated blah blah blah, assaulted carmel thing, you know, are buying cacabeans from somewhere, most of the time already dried and fermented, and then talking about how they've made chocolate from scratch. And that's not chocolate from scratch. We were making chocolate from scratch and it was pretty hard. So we did it and it was a lot of work. It was really satisfying, and the best part is that unlike when you spend weeks, you know, solving some horrible partial differenial equation that gives you a part of a result that you thought you needed to be turns that not to be what you wanted, but you still feel a sense of soll and pride that you did it, and you can only share it with yourself and two colleagues. You can understand when you make chocolate, everybody's happy.
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You buy a sea it, or you find a seed, you plant it, it grows a tree. You raise the tree, well, you pollinate it pods up here. Interestingly, the pods on cacao trees grow off of the trunk, not off the branches, so it looks a little bit alien. And the pods themselves actually look a little bit invasion of the body snatchers, which is cool. When they're mature, they turn these beautiful fall leaf colors, like it's the very new England of them, Like these deep yellows and oranges and reds, very beautiful. And you cut them off and you split them open, and inside are these seeds that are covered in a white pulp and it's delicious. It smells like leachy fruit. It's very fresh, very fragrant, and it tastes really good. But the beans themselves are heat, them are very bitter, and it tastes nothing like chocolate. There isn't a hint of chocolate in any of the flavor profiles of any of this.
Okay.
The pods have a very planty smell, okay, very very fragrant, like fresh cut grass, and the pulp has a kind of a stringent but very pleasant, slightly sweet, light chy flavor. And the beans are sort of these like purple bitter, soft seeds. And so when you hold this in your hand, you think, how the hell does this become chocolate? Right, So the next step is to meant them. And to do this, the beans are put into piles for thermal purposes so that the heat of fermentation can build up, which accelerates fermentation. And they have to be covered with something that prevents moisture from escaping, because they require a moist environment to ferment. And so we crew I have plenty of fermentors that do excellent temperature control, so we set up some fermentors with different piles. And in the literature there are people in the industry who erate their piles, who mix their piles, who don't touch them. There are different varieties of cacao. We now know which variety we have, but we didn't at the time. So the fermentation profiles are apparently different between like let's say a creole, which is one variety.
In a front taro which is a different variety.
But fundamentally what happens is a yeast to regular you know, sacrimces yeast fermentation takes place and that creates a certain temperature profile. So let's say the fermentor is running at eighty five degrees fahrenheit, it will then go up to ninety five or ninety eight degrees fahrenheit because of the heat induced by the mechanical action of fermentation itself. The biological action that will then fall off and you can smell as you you know, as one does is going to measure the temperature of your cockau fermentation piles. You can smell a strong yeast not so you get a ready note out of it, and the temperature will drop and then it will rise again as the bacteria that are symbiotic with those yeasts begin their fermentation process, and they are an acid producing bacteria actually similar to the bacteria that make acetic acid, probably identical in many cases, And you can smell that ascetic smell as you do your temperature checks and potentially ir rotations, there's a second spike in temperature and then that goes down and this takes anywhere from five to seven days. And you want to be very careful because once that bacterial action ceases, you're in danger of a mold step, which comes afterward as the mold is no longer deterred in its growth because of the action of the other organisms.
Right.
So, like in a lot of fermented foods, the preservation comes from biological competition, not from sterility. So you know in most fermented foods, or like in your starter for your sourdough, the reason that it doesn't go bad right away is because there's so much you know, bacterial action from the yeast in bacteria in your starter that no other organisms can compete and that keeps it stay errol Okay, so the same thing is happening in the cacao. You don't want to let it go too long. But during the end of that bacterial fermentation phase, and this is the craziest thing in the universe, it starts to smell like brownies.
Wow, that's when the chocolate comes back.
So it goes from and I was not prepared for this, and you can't read about this apparently, you know, I have one of my son's best friends is from Trinidad, and while I was doing this, he visited with my son from from college and I was doing this fermentation and he looked over and he's like, oh you for men and chocolate. Cool, because of course he'd seen this his whole life, right, But for me, I was unprepared for this transformation to take place. And it really it smells just like brownies. So it's gone from this very sort of like grassy pod, lighty, bitter thing to smelling like bread, to smelling like vinegar, and one day you open the fermenter and it smells like brownies.
It's insane.
Makes me wonder who the first human was to experience that, you know, thousands of years ago.
One experiment that I will do shortly is to just leave some cocow pods around and to see if I let them ferment internally, if I crack them open at some point, they smell like chocolate. You can imagine that somebody happens upon one that's sat for the right amount of time and it's delicious smelling, right, it might occur to that person to try to recreate that somehow right. So then you dry them. They have at this point become kind of like a very dry mac and cheese consistency. So you spread the beans out on a dehydrator or out in the sun. We use the dehydrator because we can control it, and you get them to about three percent moister content. And I have all the equipment to measure this, but you know, it just basically means pretty dry, and it takes a while. It takes about two days, and if you're running the drying machines in your house, it'll drive you insane because your whole house will smell like brownies, but at first sort of acid brownies, because the vinegar smell is still there. And as you dry them, it goes down, but there's still notes of vinegar from the bacterial fermentation process in the beans, and you end up with these brown cacao beans and they're a little shrunken and a little sad looking. And then you're ready to roast, and the roasting is again, it's pretty similar to coffee roasting, but it's much easier and shorter. And I'm really glad that I on coffee roasting in the past because it prepared me for this. But you roast them with a decreasing thermal profile from about two hundred and fifty down to two hundred C. And you want the bean temperature to get to around two hundred C at the end, and you'll hear them crack if you have three percent moisture. That moisture the inside the bean will boil and and pop the shell. Actually, it's it's kind of like ads, right. It goes from it changes the curvature of the shell, and then you get a pop and then you know that you're done. And people will do two pops or one pop. And there's a lot of YouTube video on this because people buy a lot of fermented dried beans from South America and process the chocolate at them. That's one of the things that a fancy San Francisco chocolate chop will do. Okay, so we sort of after I did the fermentation and the drawing, I re entered the realm where there's a lot of video help on how to do this right. But I didn't really look at it because I was like, I'm better than all of them. I did all this right, So do the roasting, and then you have these beans that are sort of like now puffy, so they're kind of you know, rugby ball shaped, and then you have to shell them, and they are machines that do this. When you buy commercial nibs, the nib is actually the bean itself once it's been shelled, after being roasted and dried, dried and roasted, they're all little bits and it's because of the machine in order to remove the shell mechanically has to sort of pulverize everything. But if you do it by hand sitting in front of the television, you get the complete beans out. And they're a picture of this on my Twitter. And I have to say during the roasting process, what happens is the vinegar smells and all the other strange odors go away and you're left with just a pure chocolate smell. And it's very, very remarkable. It smells like the most incredible chocolate cake brownie that you've ever baked in your oven.
At the end of the roasting process.
I've actually roasted cocow beans myself on the stovetop and been amazed. It's like a river of chocolate smell. It's like snorting pure chocolate. It's incredible.
Yeah, And so then from there you go on and do the normal thing to make chocolate. And it's important to have a wet grinder. It's important to let it go for you know, three or four days, because the cacow beans are actually just basically wood and it's extremely fibrous, but it contains you know, a lot of fat, the cocow butter inside that fibers structure. And there's a sort of a magical thing that happens when you grind this and you get a little bit of heat out of the mechanical grinding action, which is that you start to get this magical paste and that's that's getting close to the thing that we think of as chocolate. And you have to wet grind this thing and a wet stone grinder for days and days to get the average particle size small enough in that fiber structure that on the tongue it feels like you.
Would expect from smooth chocolate.
And so that takes a lot of time and turns out some equipment and knowledge. I did a little study, you know, because I have microscopes and autoclays and all the stuff in my kitchen from the bread projects. So I was able to do some smears and look at average particle sizes and correlate that because I was given the hint from some chocolate tears, correlate that with the current drawn by the melange by the wet grinder. There's a pretty linear relationship between you've meant a current that you're using and the particle size, and that's how they determine when they get done.
So you can tell the size of your chocolate particles by how hard your grinder has to work basically.
Correct, yeah, at a given temperature.
And then there's some chemistry involved in like actually making it a bar. It's got like some complex crystal structure that you need to reach with the right temperature voyage for this whole process.
Right, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and call that physics because it's really crystallography. You know, I work with a lot of chemists, so we can we you know, we can fight over this.
But yeah. The the trick then after that.
Is to make it into a stable bar, and that means establishing with the cacao butter with that fat. It's type to crystal, which is a stable crystalin matrix in shirt sleeve room temperature conditions for human beings. That's referred to in the industry as temper, but it's really a crystalin structure, as you know and alluded to, and so finding out how to establish that is a bit of a trick. And part of the problem that we had is we know too much. So it was me and biologists and chemists and another physicist, and so we knew too much about crystallography. So we did all these crazy schemes that only kind of partially worked, and then finally we just did the thing that everybody else doesn't work fine and made bars. And you know, when we made the first chocolate from our own beans from our trees, all of us thought it was the best chocolate we'd ever had, easily, And I am still completely ruined. It's been six months now, but I am ruined, and my wife is ruined, and everyone is ruined. We can't we get other chocolate, and it's just not as good. And recently I was very, very very brave, and I gave a bar of this chocolate to my friend jose Andres, the chef, and he said it was the best chocolate he's ever had, And he's now told other people it's the best chocolate he's ever had.
And so.
You know, I think that keeping everything simple and pure, you know, not adding anything. The only ingredient in our chocolate bar is sugar in some measure to give you, you know, the amount that you like, how dark you want your chocolate. In our case, we went to about seventy percent. How it sounds amazing, there's nothing else in it, and it's it's really good, and you know, we're going to keep on doing it because it's so good. It's it's it's very interesting. And really, even though it's so hard to do and has so many steps, the magic in the last part of the fermentation.
Is worth it. It's worth it.
I do it over and over again because I never tire of that moment when it changes to chocolate. It's incredible. And you know, I'm around fermentation all the time. We have the Ancient Bread project, other bread projects, other fermentation projects, and you know, the even when you're doing beer making, the fermentation is a you know, nano machinery process and service of something else in service of getting CO two distributed evenly through you know, a piece of dough so that you can freeze it in the oven and have bread right freeze the structure by baking in the case of the cacao, the fermentation, it is, the flavor, it's everything.
It's remarkable.
So, now that you've had this incredible dark chocolate and you understand it all the way from dirt to bar, what are your thoughts on industrial chocolate, for example Hershey's.
Oh, it's a valid industrial product. Sometimes you have to have these things, and you know, I'm not gonna I'm not going to crap on them. It's it's an incredible story. Actually, the Hershey story is an incredible story, both from a business and a technology standpoint. But I am ruined now, and I am very seriously considering, you know, expanding this operation and maybe trying to grow a bunch more trees kind of hydroponically in this way, and seeing if you could make more of this special chocolate in that way.
So we'll see.
Sounds amazing and sounds delicious. Well, thanks very much for taking us on a tour of your chocolate adventure. Really happy to be grabbing on your coattails and following along to learn.
Daniel, it's always a pleasure to talk to you man. Send me more of your best students, please, we'll do Thanks very much, take care.
All right. Pretty interesting conversation there, Daniel. What is your big takeaway from all of this chocolate science?
The takeaway for me is that once a physicist, always a physicist. You're trained to think like a physicist. You're going to apply that to everything else you do in your life, whether it's baking bread, inventing new video game consoles, or growing chocolate bars.
Now, do you think knowing all of this physics is helping him make better chocolate or is he actually leaning on chemistry?
I think there's a fuzzy line here. Yeah.
Absolutely, it sounds like pretty straight up chemistry.
He's definitely scientific thinking, no offense, no offense. Yeah, that's fine, I get it. You know, the chocolate is more chemistry than physics. I'll admit it. Absolutely so.
His physic preparation is of no help.
I mean he didn't get down to like the fundamental chocolate particle or anything. So having been a particle physicist, I don't think is an issue. But definitely his scientific background helped him, like read the papers and do this carefully and methodically and you know, gather some data.
Well, I feel like this is maybe like a small badge type of chocolate production. But things get a little bit more complicated and maybe more difficult when you try to scale it up and you try to give chocolate to a lot of people.
Yeah, exactly. You have a lot more freedom to play when you're making up just a few bars for you and your friends. But when you're the chief chocolate officer at one of the world's biggest snack food companies, then you have a whole different set of challenges.
Well, you actually got to talk to a former research scientist at a large corporation. How did you meet this fellow?
So one of our listeners, Darcio, is a chocolate researcher in Brazil, and heard us joking about chocolate on the podcast and wrote to me suggesting that we do a deep dive into chocolate. He was actually the inspiration for this episode and introduced me to his friend Jim Kaiser, former chief chocolate officer at Mars Inc.
Well wait, wait, wait, wait, we know an actual chocolate researcher, Like, what's this research?
It's like chemical engineering, you know, industrial processes for producing chocolate at scale with consistency and purity and quality.
WHOA, yeah, because I guess they farm a lot of chocolate in Brazil.
Right, They do farm a lot of chocolate all over the world, and in the interview with him, we talk about the challenges of getting chocolate from all different locations where the processes are different.
How there is a different taste that come from different beans.
Right exactly, which is not what you want. If you're the Mars company, you want your eminem to taste the same, no matter where you are in the world and which batch of chocolate it was. We'll get into all that, but first let's take a quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are us. Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emission. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, we're back and we're talking about physics and chocolate.
All right, Well, here is Daniel's interview with Professor and Kaiser, former chocolate research scientists at Mars Corporation.
So it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast. John Kaiser, an expert in mass production of chocolate and a researcher who has worked on the forefront of chocolate knowledge. John, Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Daniel. It's a happy day if I get to talk about chocolate. I appreciate you invited me to this podcast.
Thank you. Well, I want to know how does one become a chocolate researcher. Is that something you grew up wanting to be and followed your passion or you stumbled into it?
But I knew I wanted to work on food. My father had worked on food at PNG. Their brands pring goals folders, and I love the black box, and that's what chemical engineers solve. We have raw materials, dried potatoes and every one side of the box, and you have a beautifully shaped pring go out the other end. It tastes, it looks straight. So I was always fascinated by what's the black box? So I knew I did enter the food industry. I started craft in Chicago, first upon glen View, working on a variety of food brands, ice cream, mayonnaise, and Miracle whip, and then that led us to a role at Mars working on cocoa and chocolate, and that's where I spent almost thirty years. Wow, every aspect of coca and child production globally.
So what do people not know about making chocolate? I mean, it's much more than just to roast the beans and blend them up. What is sort of the secret sauce to turning cocoa beans into chocolate that people might not understand?
Well, I'd say the fascinating part of chocolate, and I always include cocoa as part of that, is how difficult it is to produce a consistent, wonderful tasting product. And that's really what's kept me intrigued in this area for so many years, and I still work on it. Here at iowash Fate. So the linkage I see is nearly every aspect of the unit operations that chemical engineering study, from harvest of a cocoa pod in origin all the way to a molded product in M and M a Hershey milk chocolate bar. Nearly every aspect has a linkage to flavor and texture and solving that. Understanding that and understanding that in an operational role every day is not easy. So that's really kept me very interesting because there's issues all along that product pipeline.
Give us an example of something that's challenging in mass production of delicious chocolate.
So back to the complexity. So cocoa is not cocoa first of all, So the variety of cocoa that you find in the origin can have an bone on flavor. So you have to pick what you want, and what you want is what the consumer ultimately wants, so you have to really start with the consumer. But how that product is harvested really more, how it's fermented in origin can again have a major impact on flavor. For example, and practices are not standardized. New growers farmers across the lobe don't have a script and say, oh, this is how we do it. No, they don't have the script. They do it based on history. They do it based on economics. It's not well controlled. As soon as pods are open in the Origin, they're opening with machete. I mean that is the typical way of opening a pod. Pods have a very thick husk. You extract about fifty beans from a pod, and the beans are surrounded by this sticky, gooey, high sugar, high acid, relatively speaking, pulp that actually tastes delicious. By the way, if you're in origin, taste taste the beans. Don't chew the beans because extremely astringent. It. We'll get to that point here about fermentation. But as you suck the pulp off the beans, they have a very pleasant fruity characteristic that those in Ecuador and Brazil and Darcy who can speak to this, will extract that and convert into a beverage.
Like a chocolate fruit beverage.
It really doesn't taste chalcol at all. It just has a fruity, pleasant flavor.
I wonder how many people have ever tasted that. I don't think I know anybody else who's ever tasted the actual chocolate fruit.
It's definitely rare. You know, you have to pasteurize it in origin if you want to ship it somewhere. Because here's the point, it's the microfloor in the environment automatically goes after those sugars as soon as you open it, so fermentation starts the instant you open the pot. Those beans are manually scooped out. And this may seem a bit ar kid because it is because it has not really changed over the course of you know, at least one hundred years. Where those beans are then piled on banana LEAs, typically on the ground in origin heat and the fermentation begins.
And to be clear, fermentation means like microbial processing. Right, basically we're talking about desirable rotting, right.
That's it, That's exactly correct. But it has a huge influence if you and some growers do this around the globe where they'll skip the fermentation, they'll go straight to dry it. And if you do that, the beans are very very stringent, very bitter. And there are some recipes that may be an attribute you want. That's another i say, processed driver that you can use to influence your flavor. But typically say the fermentation is between five and seven days.
Five and seven days sitting there rotting on a banana leaf.
Yes, Now the larger drowers will have i'll call it box fermentation. They'll place these beans in a much larger, larger wooden box and then they'll actually use a hand agitator really just hand scoop and move those beans around because you imagine the thermal heat of the fermentation will be greatest in the center, so you want to spread that out across the whole box. So yeah, for sure, beans that are not fermented and those that are fully fermented will taste dramatically different. And those practices are very different, I'll say, the more the standardized fermentation process that we've witnessed or those that you see in West Africa Ivory Coast, Godam where they're typically fully fermented. Now, keep in mind, you can go, you can be over fermented, and that will also cause a flavor impact. And then anything in between zero and say five to seven days. So this is where the complexity just begins. Dandel So you can have a whole range of flavor influences. And I won't call it a flavor defect because flavor is subjective. You may love it, Hey, I love an over fermented being in its flavor or totally underfremented. So it actually ends up being a consumer driven experience.
What do they want? But if you want to produce the same eminem every day, every year for thirty years, how do you handle that when you get a batch of over fermented in a batch of under fermented. Do you have to adjust the process or do you have some way to mask it or how does that work?
That's one of the distinctions you're hitting right now is the small versus large. I'm a little biased because I spent my career at Marsy. We're working on all these challenges across thirty years, and it is difficult to make an eminent taste the same around the globe. It is very difficult because you have so many influences, including the practices they're observed. So the way you mitigate that is a lot of coke we purchased off the market, but per our spec per our flavor and chemical spec so you want to make sure that it is fermented properly and you're buying best specification. So that's how Marge.
Will do it.
All the way to mitigate am I giving anything wait here is pretty typical for a Hershy and Mars and I'm on delays. Is there's a cocoa recipe. You would not bank the farm on a single origin. You want a percentage of different origins and that gives you the flavor profile that is consistent, and it also helps mitigate that risk because civil wars do occur in ivory coasts.
Yeah, you have.
Weather impact, sustainability concerns. Lots of these things will occur over the course of a year, and you have to be prepared to move around and ensure that the product still meets the products back.
So what's the major difference between like very fancy, artisanal small batch bar of chocolate you might pay like eight dollars for and something like a Hershey bar. Is it the quality of the chocolate? Is it preservatives? Is something different in the process? What is basically the difference between the spectrum of quality for chocolate?
The large manufacturer has a lot more at risk. So if you have a recall of a product because of some crobial contamination or adulteration due to incidental form matter that's in the product you're recalling, it could really sacrifice your brand. So the large manufacturers tend to be very conservative, but they're very consistent, I'll say very consistent. The smaller players have more leeway, they have less at risk, and they're faster, they're more flexible. I think the thing that I think is interesting is the large manufacturers have a business Eminem's biggest global brand for chocolate. They want to be as flexible as as small guys, but they can't. The small guys want to have more market share, but that's a challenge for them also, So the small manufacturers, as you said costs before this call, it just took a look at a cost program. Two cents per gram for a Dove or Hershey no chocolate, roughly twenty cents a gram for Dandili, which is a very specialty niche product. Really, you know, that's the difference in order and mattitude in difference. So what are consumers willing to pay for what they get?
Let's talk about the Hershey bar also, because it's iconic. On the podcast recently, I commented that I was not a particular fan of the Hershey bar because it has this sour flavor to it. Where does that sourness come from? Is it some property of milk chocolate? Is it some secret process that Hershey has. Why are Hershey bar so sour?
Yes?
I love the history of chocolate, so let's talk Hershey. Hershey started making caramel in Lancaster, PA. That's where my family and I spent thirty years just north of there in Manheim. Started that business, uhrew it, grew it pretty well downtown Lancaster, went to the expo in Chicago, to this famous expo where this iconic Columbian expo in Chicago, where he came across Layman, which is a manufacturer chocolate, really liquoric melling equipment. Came across that thought at that time that the future is chocolate, not caramel. So moved to child production, bought that equipment in Chicago, brought it back and started Hershey pid making chocolate small scale. Didn't know how to do it yet, didn't know how. He hired a German scientist by name of Klein Klein and with him began to learn about child production. And if you ever talked to a European I going to this fair, Hersey, I just want to give you kind of what my skew is. I might spin on it is and you've already mentioned this. The Europeans are not accustomed to sour milk in their chocolate. They're just not accustomed to it. And that's the history of chocolate and where child has taste very different from those in the US. So the story is, and I'm sure a Hershey representative may dispute my spin on this, is we talked to Europeans and say, you know, they got the process of drying liquid milk wrong in that it became there's lipid catalysis that creates organic acids that gives you the sour character that you get from baby puke.
I'm sorry, did you just say baby puke?
I did? I did, And I've heard those terms from other Hershey people, so I'm not taking these terms out of context.
So we have it on the record from an expert in chocolate that Hershey's tastes like baby puke. All right, Yeah, that's excellent.
Introdution on this one. And as I said, flavor is subjective. My father loves Hershey chocolate. That's what he was offered, that's what he ate. He still loves it, and it has a unique i'll call it a unique acid character. It's organic acid, but tyic acid flavor in that chocolate. It gives it that unique flavor. So the story is it could be a myth that in the process because it was not known how to dry liquid milk and do it in an efficient way that did not harm the quality. Not in the US. Nestley was figuring that out in Europe. Okay, so they were figuring it out. Hers she was trying to do it his way and came up with a way to do it. Developed this acidic flavor which became the Profile, which is now their signature flavor, and it is well Weldlife. It's the biggest brand in the US, so they've got something going on there. So, you know, no disparaging Hershey, they've got a well, well liked product that consumers here really love.
I mean, if you can make a billion dollar business out of a baby puke candy, then hats off to you, right, Like, wow, very impressive. I could never accomplish that. I don't think I'd invest in that stuff, but I'd be wrong apparently. So then you know, if we are still innovating on chocolate and still using chemical engineering and creative ideas to develop new chocolates, what's happening right now, what's like at the forefront of chocolate research, the most brilliant minds in chocolate. What problems are they trying to crack right now?
So if you look at the headlines today, sustainability, carbon dioxide, so things are around. Replacing bury powders with plant based proteins are hot. They were hot five years ago. I know there's interest in it, and they are still very important to consider to reduce greenhouse gases, i'd image. I know Mars for sure has a sustainability plan and all the large manufacturers certainly have a public disclosed approach that they're taking for that. So anything around the way that is processed is being examined to reduce energy assumption. That's I say a blanket statement because each of these components where it's roasting, conching which is an intensive mixing step, or size reduction are very energy intensive. There's a lot of energy that's required to get to the state that's appealing to consumers. So any place now it's more innovation on the process side. Okay, it's innovation with the process side, but it's really important important for the manufacturer and also the consumer is also looking at businesses to see what they're doing that's good for the planet, So for sure, that's where a lot of the innovation is occurring. And then, as I mentioned, on the ingredient side, is more plant based raw materials that can be used and still deliver that superior taste.
Fascinating. Now, you mentioned you started your career being intrigued in things like pringles. You've taken the potatoes on one side and outcome these perfect crisps. And I've noticed this bizarre innovation in desserts recently, this chocolate covered pringles. And since you began your career in pringles and you ended up in chocolate, I wondered, is this something you came up with? Is this your unholy unification of the snack universe.
I can't take credit for that, I could.
But do you enjoy them? Do you think?
For sure? Yeah? I think that said the savory sweet combination, I think it is very good and really appealing. And coming from the chocolate capital of the US, which is southeastern Pennsylvania. That's Hershey Bars has large operation there. You have Blomber, which is a large industrial producer there, get divers based out of it. You have a lot of candy, a lot of candy, your peppermint patties or Pennsylvania, so you have a lot of candy production that curve there. It's also the savory snack capital. Oh I see, so hey they're both there. Why not?
So nobody knows snacking like Pennsylvania.
It's right press, a lot of ractual production the Dutch. You know, if you ever go to live as Pennsylvania, it's deemed the place for prezels in the US for first created and that's not far from Lancaster. So yeah, pretzels and savory snacks are really big in that part of the country.
Well, I guess we have Pennsylvania to thank us for pushing us forward on the forefront of human snacking. That's amazing, And thanks very much John Kayser for telling us all about chocolate production and the challenges in producing huge quantities of consistent chocolate that everybody enjoys around the world.
Really appreciate your time. Well, thanks for the invitation. This has been a blast for me. Appreciate it all.
Right. Interesting, what did you think about how they approach chocolate making in large scales.
I think it's fascinating how the small batch people are really trying to make a unique flavor and the large batch people are really not. They're really struggling with the same question, but they're on different sides of the issue. Jim talks about how the difference in the fermentation process leads to different kinds of flavor, and that sounds awesome if you're artisanal, but that's a nightmare if you're industrial.
Well, I feel like it's not like they're not trying to come up with a nique, unique flavor. It's like they're trying to keep the flavor consistent.
Yeah, exactly.
They might be aiming for, like the flavor of the most amount of people like, and to make that consistent.
Yeah, I think that is exactly what they're going for. And also I didn't realize what a deep rivalry there is between Hershey and Mars. There's a long history there involving like espionage and theft and like really deep anger between these two companies. And you all know that Hershey's isn't my favorite, but no disrespect to those who love it, because it's not about cost. There's lots of cheap chocolate out there I love, and expensive ones I don't. It's just personal preference. So probably if I want an unbiased opinion about the flavor of Hershey's chocolate. I shouldn't have been talking to somebody from Mars.
Well, I didn't even know there are two separate companies, Like there's just those two, Like those are the big chocolate.
Those two Pennsylvania snack companies really do dominate the chocolate market.
And they're both based in Pennsylvania.
M exactly the snack capital of the world. According to Jim.
Geyser, Wow, why Pennsylvania.
Somebody from Pennsylvania has to answer that for.
Us, Well, we might have to buy them at bar Chocolate we live to tell us.
Once that grant comes in, we'll be ready to do that.
All right. Well, another interesting dive into daniels as snack habits. Hasn't your doctor at this age told you, like, hey, maybe you should dial down on the saturated fats there.
No chocolate is healthy, man has all sorts of good stuff in it in moderation.
Again, we're doctors, but we're not that kind of dog.
Fermented foods, man, my wife tells me fermented foods are good for your gut.
These statements have not been approved by the Federal Drug Administration.
Do not take health advice from me. Please do not take healthy tea. Don't even take a writing advice from me or anything that's right. Don't take any advice, career advice, life advice, any of that stuff. Just listen for the jokes and the knowledge.
Yeah, how about physics advice.
And do my best to give us an honest understanding of the physics of the universe for sure.
All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.
For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases, many farms use anaerobic digesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's last sustainability to learn more.
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