Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate
Polyglycerol polyricinoleate, commonly known as PGPR, is being seen
increasingly often in commercially-produced chocolate. The good people of
Wikipedia describe it as “a yellowish, viscous liquid comprised of
polyglycerol esters of polycondensed fatty acids from castor oil. It may
also be polyglycerol esters of dimerized fatty acids of soya bean oil.”
Now doesn’t that sound delicious? Serve me up a bowlful, please!
But the slimy yellow story doesn’t end there. The chocolate industry
(Hershey’s, Nestle, Mars, and other low-quality high-finance producers)
began using it as of 2006 to make coating chocolate thinner and chocolate
products smoother. Kerry Bio-Science, one producer of PGPR and similar
products, boasts in a rather awkwardly-phrased way that PGPR enables
“products to be manufactured using lower levels of fat without sacrificing
high quality characteristics. Key Benefits: viscosity control, aeration,
texture.” They also suggest using their polysorbates and sorbitan esters
in chocolate to reduce bloom and for stability, texture, and
crystallization control. They seem bent on amping up chocolate with every
chemical contortion they can find. But what effect does this have on the
end product and its consumer?
There have been a number of studies done on PGPR over the past fifty
years. All of the studies I reviewed concluded that it did not have any
adverse short-term effects on human or rat health, even when consumed in
amounts ten to one hundred times as large as the very small percentages
often used in food. But we don’t consume food in the hopes that it won’t
harm us, we consume food to nourish our bodies. When PGPR is used to
replace cocoa butter, what are we losing?
Certainly, we can lose some flavor. This has only been addressed
anecdotally, as far as I know. It makes sense that we would lose flavor:
when a local chocolate cafe, Bittersweet, prepared to open its doors, it
offered potential customers a sample of three chocolates it was going to
carry. One was milk, one dark, and one the loathed white chocolate. But it
was free, so my friends and I tried it. We were amazed to find that it was
actually edible, and even tasted chocolatey. The owners explained that
this particular white chocolate included a high percentage of cocoa butter
left in from the manufacturing process, whereas most companies use
deodorized cocoa butter in their white chocolate because it is more
readily available and lets them control the taste.
Deodorized cocoa butter is more readily available not only because it
allows for flavor control, but also because it is often removed in the
manufacturing process and sold to the cosmetics industry. PGPR is often
hailed as a cost-saving move for chocolate companies because it is much
cheaper than cocoa butter, but it is rarely pointed out that for those
companies who manufacture the chocolate themselves, there is money to be
made in redirecting part of their foodstuffs to rub on consumers’ skins at
a much higher price than that of chocolate.
The author of the Wikipedia article about PGPR, in his Yelp account as
“Aaron P.,” states that “It has a detectable and somewhat offputting
aftertaste…. American chocolate makers have been lobbying for years to
be allowed to add vegetable fats to their products so they can sell the
cocoa butter at a higher profit to cosmetic manufacturers. So far they
have been thwarted, so now they have moved to using PGPR to lower the
levels of cocoa butter while still remaining undetectable to most people.”
He also noted that “Unfortunately, someone keeps altering the (Wikipedia
article) to detail the glories of PGPR, and I have to keep fixing it.”
So, some people can detect an unpleasant aftertaste in foods using PGPR,
and it represents a healthful ingredient being removed from our food, much
like the contrast between the surfeit of cheap low-nutrition white breads
in U.S. supermarkets and the high cost of the very nutritious wheat germ
that is removed from them and marketed to “health nuts.” But is cocoa
butter really good for our insides, or are we better off removing it for
external use only?
The 1996 study conducted by Andrew Waterhouse of UC Davis which discovered
the phenols (potent antioxidants) in chocolate also revealed that these
antioxidants come from cocoa butter and the stearic acid it produces. It
demonstrated that the phenols prevented LDL cholesterol from building up
in arteries. Another study had subjects follow diets in which the majority
of fat calories came from either chocolate or butter; only those with the
butterfat diet showed an increase in LDL cholesterol.
This is why dark chocolate, which usually contains between about 30% and
50% cocoa butter, is touted for its antioxidant properties, and a bar of
Hershey’s milk chocolate is not. Unfortunately, Hershey’s in particular –
one of the biggest users of PGPR – has also moved to take advantage of the
new healthier perception of dark chocolate. Not only have they begun
buying small high-end chocolate producers like Scharffen-Berger and Joseph
Schmidt Chocolates, but they have also expanded their dark chocolate line
and begun marketing it heavily as a healthy treat. Besides the irony of
their simultaneous replacement of antioxidant-filled cocoa butter with
PGPR in their cheaper chocolates, they have put corn syrup in many
items from the more
expensive and supposedly healthy dark chocolate line.
This is the kind of behavior that buying PGPR-enhanced chocolate supports.
Dishonest; unscrupulous; pulling the wool over consumers’ eyes. Read your
ingredient listings carefully, and research the unfamiliar, and you can
feed your mind as well as your body.
Blog, is doing great work to educate people about fat replacement in
chocolate. You see,
it may not stop at a little PGPR/cocoa butter blend. Right now,
chocolate is cocoa liquor and cocoa butter and whatever else you want
to add… sugar, milk, raisins, crunchy frogs…. But some chocolate
producers, including (and I know this will shock you) Hershey’s, are
asking the FDA to let them replace all the cocoa butter with other fats
and still call it chocolate. As Cybele has pointed out, they can
replace the cocoa butter with motor oil right now if they want and sell
that, they just can’t call that chocolate and they shouldn’t be able to.
can send your comments to the FDA here, today only because I am
coming to this issue late! I will remove that link tonight, and keep you
all updated on what else you can do as the situation develops. You can
learn more about this at
