How do I become a chocolate taster

Chocolate is surprisingly hard to work with, says Cat Channon, because youre using a blend of fat as well as cocoa. Photograph: Alamy

Cat Channon has never forgotten her first taste of Cadburys chocolate. I must have been two years old. Cadburys Buttons were Mums little treat and she gave some to me. I have a strong memory of sitting with her, savouring each and every one. Little did she know the experience would mark the start of her career as a master chocolate taster, product developer and laboratory scientist for Mondelez (formerly Kraft Foods), which now manufactures Cadburys chocolate. I studied chemistry at Warwick University and started looking for lab work when I graduated. I leapt at the opportunity to work here. I was 22 years old, and so keen in the interview I told them they could pay me in chocolate!

Instead, she was offered 7.50 an hour to work in the Bourneville factory analytical lab, testing caramel. Most of the tests involve heating it up. So you sit in this room that smells nicely of warm caramel, and you have to make sure its not runnier or thicker than the specifications, and that it doesnt have an odd taste. That is where her degree rather than her love of chocolate made all the difference: You need to be able to analyse the caramel to make sure it wont go off and has been made to the recipe, so for example, Id conduct moisture testing to analyse the amount of water in the product and conduct viscosity tests to see how runny it was.

Chocolate, she says, is surprisingly hard to work with. Its very temperamental, because youre using a blend of fat as well as cocoa. The amount of time you spend conching mixing all the ingredients together is crucial, because the more you blend a mixture, the more you release the flavours.

Its obvious that for Channon, making chocolate taste delicious is an scientific pursuit, affected by variables like the climate of the region the cocoa beans were grown in, how the beans were dried (over a fire or in the sun), the amount of sugar you put in, and how the chocolate moves around in your mouth. This is where the viscosity of the mixture comes into play: During the mixing process, the more you grind down the dry ingredients and the smaller you get the little particles, the thicker the chocolate becomes and the finer it tastes in the mouth.

The luckiest break of her career came, she says, when she was offered the opportunity to move across from the analytical lab to the research and development team. Here, many of her colleagues have trained as chefs, rather than scientists. If youre working on something like Marvellous Creations [a new bar, varieties of which are filled with jellies and popping candy], where youre interested in which flavours are exciting right now, you need to take more of a food-based approach. But if youre doing something like creating a new chocolate recipe or a new filling recipe, or looking at how you can aerate a chocolate bar to make it bubbly, then a chemistry background becomes very important.

Just three years after starting her first job in the analytical lab, Channon is leading her own R&D project developing new products. The role, which typically pays between 24,000 and 30,000, necessitates that she spend at least 10% to 20% of her time tasting chocolate. The marketing team will come up with a concept for a new product for example, for Marvellous Creations, it was something fun, that families can share, thats different and it is our job, in R&D, to bring those ideas to life. Well look to stretch the product briefs as much as possible, and that means making different samples and tasting them to discover what we do and dont like. The samples are then tested consumers to find out which they like best. After that, we speak to engineers who know about the manufacturing and packaging process, as well as the marketing and legal team, to find out which are possible, which are expensive and which are the most exciting, she says. Then we pick the best idea from that and look at how we can make it even better.

Her current project means she is spending a fair amount of time eating Cadburys Dairy Milk (there are piles of CDM, as she calls it, on her desk) and thinking about how the different flavours, textures and ingredients in a piece of chocolate will come to you at different points: You have to know your product. Youre always building on whats already been on the market.

The biggest challenge of her job is coming up with a new chocolate recipe that will appeal to - and can be manufactured for Mondelezs massive global audience. You can spend six months creating the most wonderful product thats absolutely delicious, but you cant make it in the factory, or you cant package it, or its not kosher or suitable for vegetarians.

This does not stop Channon from tasting and experimenting with an open mind: I think its better to go wild and create the best product you can, and then take a step back and think about the regulations and restrictions. Because maybe they will lift or you will find a way to do it.

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How do I become a chocolate taster