Addison Stoddard: "Welcome back to another USU Extension Education highlight. My name is Addison Stoddard, and joining me today is Andrea Leduc, production manager for Aggie Chocolate Factory. Thanks so much for joining me again, Andrea."
Andrea Leduc: "Yeah, I'm so excited."
Addison: "To start out today, I'd like to know a little bit more about the science behind chocolate. So could you tell me a little bit more about that."
Andrea: "One of the things that happens at the Chocolate Factory is we give tours on a regular basis, and by the end of the tour, I always get, 'oh my gosh. I had no idea there was so much science involved in the process of making chocolate.' I spent 20 years as a chef, and even then, I didn't know how chocolate was actually made from bean to bar, and so coming in and experiencing this has been such a unique experience.
So the reason we have a chocolate factory here at Utah State is because it is part of a class called Chocolate: Science, History, and Society where you learn the basics of bean to bar chocolate making. We learn about the history [of chocolate], how we as a society have been consuming chocolate for the last 5000 years, and how to make chocolate do what we wanted to do in the industry. So we learn particle size, we learn crystallization of the fats, and we learn even a little bit on the horticulture end that there's different varieties and different types of beans. So it's kind of all over understanding the world of chocolate."
Addison: "I love how you brought in the Aggie Chocolate Factory, how you give tours, and how students are able to take classes there. How unique is that program? Is that something every university has, or is that like a very unique thing to Utah State?"
Andrea: "Great question. So we are the only university owned chocolate factory in the entire world. There was a learning factory in Germany, turns out that it's privately owned, and so people don't have access to that as a public institution. Penn State just announced that they're going to open a learning chocolate factory. So then we'll be the first learning chocolate factory, but we're still a very unique thing, and they're years out for making that happen anyway.
So at this point in time, the Aggie Chocolate Factory here at Utah State is the only kind of place you can get this hands on education. In fact, we're lucky enough to host groups of professionals who come in who don't have access to smaller machinery because they're in gigantic factories. So we get to give them access to smaller machinery and work with chocolate on a smaller scale so they can really get a handle on the science and behaviors of cocoa and changing of the environment to get the chocolate to do what they need it to do."
Addison: "That's great. What a unique thing that we have at Utah State."
