With the holidays just around the corner, chocolate goodies and candies span as far as the eye can see.
In the grocery store, we stroll past red and green colored chocolates in all our favorite varieties. We’re busily searching for recipes to bring to our neighborhood bake swap, or fantasizing about the goodies grandma has in store for us this year.
Can you imagine a holiday without chocolate? If you think that would simply be the end of the world, you might want to stock up on your favorites, because we’re in for a chocolate shortage.
A mouth-watering design, with the use of innovative materials in architecture, has produced what seems to be the wildest dream of a chocoholic. A pavilion purely composed of chocolate.
Engineers at Princeton University have collaborated with the Belgian chocolate company Barry Callebaut, the biggest chocolate manufacturer in the world, to create the first ever functional structure made entirely out of chocolate.
"I think most people just do what has been done before, and I think that is very restricting," said Sigrid Adriaenssens, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton who participated in the said project. "I think especially in structural engineering, a lot of the systems that we use have specific names and people think that they can only use the systems that already exist."
Research has it that America is the leading chocolate consuming country. However, there are some countries in Europe that consume more per person.
Around 13% of the world's yearly cocoa production, more than 500,000 tons, is used mainly for America alone to make chocolate candy. This is based on U.S. Economic Census data, which is analyzed by the National Confectioners Association (NCA). That makes up for 2/3 of total American cocoa consumption.
"Today, it is increasingly about consumers weighing not only the costs of goods, but the multitude of benefits they offer as well," says Todd Hale, who is a senior vice president, consumer and shopper insights for Nielsen. Nielsen gives global consumer information and insights.
