Barry Callebaut is venturing down avenues of research that would allow it to market its Acticoa chocolate on an ant-ageing and longevity platform.

Dark chocolate has been much on the news lately thanks to research on the healthy potential of its high antioxidant content. Barry Callebaut has devised a process with which it says it can preserve more of the natural polyphenols than is possible through conventional methods.

So far chocolate produced using this process, called Acticoa, has been marketed mainly on the basis of its high polyphenol content and health benefits associated with polyphenols. But with positive results from a pre-clinical trial in which rats that suffered oxidative stress and were fed the chocolate were seen to live considerably longer than rats that received a placebo, the company is paving the way to market it to the burgeoning anti-ageing market. Read more...