01 Jun 2015 Food Explorer #3: A South African food scientist explores chocolate in Belgium
Lisa Ronquest is one of South Africa’s top young food scientists. After leading the Mars Africa R&D team for seven years in Cape Town, she’s now ensconced in The Netherlands in a new global food R&D role for the multinational.
Keen to to share her impressions and insights with FOODStuff SA readers and her South African food industry compatriots, she’s started writing about her experiences, and we’re proud here to publish the third of her essays on her big move. This time, Lisa explores chocolate!
THE wonderful thing about living in Europe and something I hadn’t quite expected is the rich heritage and tradition around food. Whether it’s cheese from Holland, cured meats from Italy, champagne from France, beer from Germany, you’re living in the heart of where some of the most delectable foods and drinks in the world were created and mastered.
So, we head off with the kids for a long weekend in Belgium and visit Bruges for the day. Belgium is generally associated with beer, frites with mayonnaise, mussels and chocolate. As chocolate is integral to Mars and my working life, a chocolate tasting is firmly on the cards.
Spoiled for choice, there are chocolate shops all over the quaint, medieval town and we decide to wait until the end of the day before we let our twins loose in a tantalising store where handcrafted chocolates adorn the shop front. As we walk into the chosen store, they have each already identified the largest chocolate object they can see, “I’ll have the sheep, Mom” says my little boy who has already made the chocolate surface-to-weight ratio calculation in his five-year old brain!
We then visit a museum called Choco-Story – an absolute wonderland covering the history of chocolate. Discovered by the Olmec and Mayan Indians, the cocoa bean was crushed and mixed with their blood and offered it to their gods. The Spanish conquistadors helped chocolate-flavoured drinks gain popularity from Mexico to France. Finally, industrialisation of the chocolate-making process, and all the innovations in between, enabled chocolate to become an everyday treat.
Belgium is renowned for the praline. A box of Guylian hazelnut praline shell-shaped chocolates were always on the duty free shopping list when I came back to South Africa from a business trip. So while in Belgium I wanted to know more about the praline and how it came to be.
In 1912, Jean Neahaus invented the Belgian praline. Praline is French in origin and is derived from ‘Praslin’, used to describe an almond dipped in sugar. Jean was the son of Frederic, a confectioner who owned a shop, No 23 Galerie de la Reine in Brussels. Amongst confectionery he used to sell medicine covered in chocolate to make it taste better.
When Jean inherited the business he launched his idea of selling a filled chocolate, effectively replacing the medicine with cream and calling it a ‘praline’. It had a unique flavour and texture experience and became hugely successful.
The next invention came from a combined effort with his wife, Louis Agostini to solve the problem of pralines being crushed when packed in conventional paper bags. They designed a gift wrap box called the ‘ballotin’ that was patented in 1915.
This story reminds me that often the secret to real breakthrough innovation lies in connecting unrelated fields of expertise – in this case, medicine evolves into a delectable chocolate treat or trying to solve a real-life problem like the crushing of pralines. Once these inventions are successfully launched, it doesn’t take long for them to gain scale and become mainstream. In 1913, for instance, Lindt started to produce filled chocolates for the masses.
Back to the afternoon’s praline-making demo and tasting. The twins sweet smiles manage to get them two pralines to taste and we leave well satisfied.
We end the day watching the elegant swans swimming along the canal and large cart horses taking tourists for carriage tours around Bruges, all while continuing to explore well-known Belgian food delights – drinking Belgian beer and sharing a huge pot of mussels in white wine and cream!
About this column
Lisa Ronquest is currently Head of Product Development – Global Food R&D at Mars Inc, based in The Netherlands. The intention of this column is to be both a personal and professional account of a South African food scientist exploring life and work in a developed market.
You can contact her at [email protected].