Johannesburg - Melted chocolate rivers, murky in their deliciousness. Giant Jelly Tot trees and paths paved with stacked blocks of Lindt and Cadburys.
These are the images we have of the chocolate factory, the wondrous behind-the-scenes of the gooey brown goodness we munch down when we need a little TLC.
But a visit to Mondelez South Africa’s sensory lab, where chocolate bars and drinks for some of the world’s biggest confectioners are tested, paints a different picture.
It’s sterile. There is a boardroom and neat, clean booths where the tasters are handed a sample through a hatch.
Products are carefully stored and labelled.
A red light shines overhead to help prevent the tasters discerning the colour of the products, which may cause a bias in tests.
There are no Oompa Loompas. What happens behind these walls is not so much fantasy as it is science.
They call it sensory science and it’s part of the service Mondelez provides to their vast array of clients such as Cadburys and Oreo.
It goes beyond consumer research and uses a panel of trained tasters to determine, not which chocolate is good or bad, but what the sensory features of the products are.
Annelize de Wet, the Middle East Africa consumer science group leader at Mondelez, said their 24 tasters would taste chocolate four times a week for two hours a day. They use a method called Quantitative Descriptive Analysis, which in short describes the product using up to 60 different adjectives.
For example, a chocolate brand might want to change their sugar supplier for a cheaper one. But will their consumers notice a change to the product?
They would then send samples to a testing group like De Wet’s to see if there was a difference in a blind trial.
Grittier? Sweeter? If the tasters can discern between the old product and the new one, they may abandon the proposed supplier.
Earlier this year Mondelez set out to get fresh panels of chocolate tasters. They put out newspaper adverts and invited 70 people to participate in three days of screening, including numerous taste tests.
“The people also needed to be frequent users and likers of (chocolate and cocoa beverages),” said De Wet. “Imagine me feeding you chocolate two hours a day, four times a week. You have to love it.”
They ruled out any smokers or denture users, because of effects on the palette and a person’s ability to determine between different textures and tastes.
They didn’t want anyone who was too extreme or had an overly dominant personality. “Really we want the average Joe,” says De Wet.
Pam Gishen was one of those Mondelez selected for the coveted chocolate taster job. She loves chocolate so much she still finds time to eat it when she gets home from work. People think her job is a joke, but she feels people don’t realise what goes into it.
“This job, it’s not just walking in and sitting down and tasting a piece of chocolate. You have to concentrate, you have to be able to discern different tastes,” said Gishen. “I now find that anything that I eat, I analyse.”
The retired former company secretary loves to keep busy and is chairman of her homeowners’ association, reads a lot and is part of a bowls club, who are amused by her job.
But there is a sense of pride for the chocoholic, who feels like she is a behind-the-scenes voice and representative for other chocoholics.
Fellow chocolate taster Perita Marriday said the first thing people asked when they heard about her job was: “Where’s the chocolate?”
“It’s quite a lot of fun but I also think it’s not as easy as people would think. I would say it’s not just about tasting chocolate… you have to concentrate on what’s in the product,” said Marriday.
When the testers started they had to be “calibrated”, within themselves and to the other members of the group. They had to make sure they could discern between different attributes, as well as be consistent in their judgement calls.
The testers must avoid using emotional language. They are like an analytical tool, their job is not to say what they liked or disliked, but what they observed. This can be combined with consumer data on what products consumers enjoyed the most to find out what features the most enjoyed products have.
There are a lot of interesting differences between consumer attitudes across countries when it comes to chocolate. De Wet said South African consumers, and particularly low LSM consumers, tended to be overly polite.
“They don’t want to tell you, this is yuck,” said De Wet. Moroccan consumers on the other hand are well known to be highly critical and their critique of products is taken by analysts with a pinch of salt.
But our palettes are also different across countries.
Companies have tested to see if they can create products that will sell in multiple countries.
Can they make a chocolate that could be sold throughout Africa? They found it was not possible.
Even something as simple as Milo was found in testing to be different in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa.
There is one unfair side to Marriday and Gishen’s chocolate-coated work. Despite their daily munching, the women haven’t gained weight since they started.
The Star