Confectionery firms profit from Chinese chocoholics

By Samuel Shen

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Award-winning French dessert chef Hugues Pouget has his work cut out for him as he tries to turn the Chinese into chocoholics.

"In Europe, we have centuries of history about chocolate. Here, there's none," said Pouget, a 31-year-old champion of the France Des Desserts competition who started teaching Chinese chefs how to make gourmet chocolate in May.

"But Chinese people like to learn Western styles. They especially love chocolate with peanuts, mangoes and strawberries."

Lured by a huge potential market, Barry Callebaut, the world's biggest chocolate maker, moved its Asia headquarters to China from Singapore in January and brought Pouget to its Chocolate Academy in Suzhou, a city of quaint ancient pavilions and acres of new factories about 90 minutes' drive from Shanghai.

The Swiss company hopes that chocolate recipes cooked up at the academy, its second in Asia after a Singapore centre, can tempt Chinese consumers to gobble up the 25,000 metric tons of chocolate a year it will be churning out at a nearby factory.

Major global chocolate brands such as the Hershey Company and Cadbury Plc, already Barry Callebaut clients in other parts of the world, have swarmed to China.

China's 6.46 billion yuan a year ($922 million) chocolate market is less than 1 percent of the world's total.

Yet rising wealth and the increasing influence of Western tastes are fuelling annual market growth of more than 10 percent, compared with 1 to 2 percent in Europe, according to market intelligence company Euromonitor International.