Maha Khan helped make a reading 100 chocolate bar at the University of Reading, using cocoa beans grown in Berkshire and ingredients sourced entirely in the UK. The bar was created to mark the university’s 100th anniversary and stands as the first chocolate bar made from 100% British ingredients since 1932.
Khan, a master’s student at the University of Reading, harvested, fermented and processed the beans in the university’s food department. She said: “It has been amazing to follow the entire chocolate-making process, from pod to bean to bar, without leaving Reading.”
University of Reading and Berkshire
The bar comes from a place that already handles cocoa plant diversity on a large scale. Reading has more than 300 types of cocoa plant at its international cocoa quarantine centre, and the source says that centre handles 97% of the world’s international movement of cocoa plants. The chocolate was made from plants tied to that collection, turning a research resource into a finished product.
Khan said the bar “highlights the precarious nature of our food supplies” and added that cocoa plants are very sensitive to changes in temperature and rainfall. She said climate change is already causing problems in countries that produce most of the world’s cocoa, and that protecting different varieties is vital if farmers need hardier plants that can cope with a changing climate.
Six bars so far
The chocolate is still a limited edition, with only six made so far. That keeps the project closer to a demonstration than a launch, even as it shows that a bar made with 100% UK ingredients can be produced from Berkshire-grown cocoa.
A single cocoa pod can take six months to grow, so any wider production would depend on bean availability. Khan said: “We haven’t decided yet who will get to eat the chocolate.” She also said it would be fitting if the next bar went to the Princess of Wales, who was born in Reading, because the last British chocolate made was eaten by the future queen in 1932.
