Text: Barry Sargeant . Article from the April 2015 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
Popular new sugar-free, organic chocolate proves to be neither.
Any new entrant into health food market should be prepared for all kinds of scrutiny. Just ask Daniel Waldis, apparently the owner and founder of Le Chocolatier, based in Paarl. Waldis’s problems with a number of retail outlets hinge mainly around his use of the terms “no sugar” and “organic” on certain chocolates he has sold (always on a cash up-front basis).
For any number of people, this seemed like manna from heaven, especially those suffering from diabetes, and also many forms of cancer. It has been known for decades that cancer cells flourish when their host ingests sugar.
Chocolate has long been a favourite of humankind; its attraction stems from the presence of an alkaloid. As the Royal Society of Chemistry puts it, “Caffeine, nicotine, quinine and cocaine are all better-known names in the alkaloid family, but none has the same appeal as theobromine”, the active alkaloid in chocolate, derived from the cocoa bean. “A clue”, we are told, “might come from the Greek origins of the name which ap-proximates to ‘food of the gods'”.
A number of retail outlets have sent the Waldis “no sugar” chocolates to in-dependent laboratories for testing. Five sets of results have shown that the chocolate contains sucrose, ranging, rather impressively, from 26.1% to 30.9%. Waldis has complained about the results, citing a lack independence, but, he tells Noseweek, he has amended his labelling accordingly.
In the meantime, he has attracted lots of attention.
A Facebook page named “Le Chocolatier South Africa fraud” has attracted more than 1,600 “likes” to date. A number of complainants, such as Jean-Pierre le Roux, have been threatened by Waldis with court interdicts and damages claims.
Waldis has also made some other re-markable claims, not least that he has a friend in Switzerland who has invented a process that (miraculously) de-bitters cocoa beans. For anyone who has dealt with such beans, this would be the equivalent of claiming that a method has been invented to make honey without the involvement of honeybees. It’s never been done, and is unlikely ever to be done. If it were to be achieved, the inventor would make a small fortune.
For Waldis, the irony, perhaps, is that there are chocolate products which can fairly be labelled sugar-free. As WebMD, an online publication, puts it: “To sweeten ‘sugar-free’ chocolate, most companies use maltitol, a sugar alcohol that is 90% as sweet as sugar…” This type of sugar replacer (a group that includes sorbitol, xylitol, mannitol, and isomalt) mostly bypasses the ingestion process.
At one stage, Waldis claimed that he was using powdered honey to sweeten chocolate. Sounds very natural, but it’s just another source of sugar.
Debbie Logan, the passionate founder and owner of Organic Emporium in Bryanston has been one of the fiercest, but fairest, critics of what has developed into a debacle. She has contacted, where possible, suppliers that Waldis has named.
“Organic” is just one of the other – and further – claims that Waldis has put on his products, yet when Logan contacted a Swiss company that Waldis named as a supplier, they disclaimed any links with him and declared his use of their organic certification a fraud.
Logan visited Waldis at his premises on 19 May and repeatedly asked him about the sugar-free status of his chocolates; each time he confirmed the claim. Logan also established that Waldis was in fact importing chocolate bars, and reworking them into different slabs. The implication of this is that Waldis is not involved in the process of “handmade”.
As any connoisseur of fine chocolates knows, the art of the process starts with roasting cocoa beans, and then going through the long and complicated process of rendering a liquor. Only then can the crafting of the chocolate really start up.
On its website, Le Chocolatier claims that “since 2010 we have been producing unique handmade truffles and pralines the Swiss way” and that “In order to keep our clientele highly satisfied we source only the freshest and finest ingredients for our chocolate making process.”
When Logan visited Waldis’s facilities, she saw a roaster – but for coffee beans. The other equipment was apparently involved in reforming chocolate. The bottom line, however, is that nothing Waldis tells Logan checks out.
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