Confectionerynews.com has published a research about the functional chocolate market. Herebelow I am quoting some basic facts from this research about the size of the market, to read the whole research you can use the links given at the end of this posting:

Chocolate is big business. Market researcher, Euromonitor, puts the market at $100bn and notes the rise of dark and premium chocolate that is boosting the category but remains at little more than a few per cent with the bulk of the growth coming from North America and Asia.

Euromonitor estimates the global market for functional chocolate at $371.9m in 2009, growing to $460.3m in 2012. In 2002 it was worth only $141.5m.

In 2009 the bulk of sales are coming from the Asia Pacific at $175m, followed by North America at $93.8m and western Europe at $95.9m.

But North America is expected to overtake next year and will be worth $128.2m in 2012, compared to near-stagnant western Europe at $103.2m. The Asia Pacific will be worth $221.2m by then.

Latin America is not expected to register any sales in the near future while the eastern European market is not expected to climb much over $1.5m by 2012. No data was collected for the Middle East and Africa.

Mintel notes that so far in 2009 there have already been 34 functional chocolate launches, the same as 2007, but more than double the 16 debuts of 2005. Of 123 global product launches since 2005, 36 have been in the US, with Japan and Germany next at nine.

Of those launches 40 made weight management claims, 22 made cardiovascular claims, 17 made cognitive claims and 15 made digestive health claims.

While no functional chocolate has broached the mainstream, many have achieved niche level success and it is fair to say that every major chocolate player has an interest in developing healthy chocolate lines, even those at the back-end like chocolate supply behemoth, Barry Callebaut, which has academies devoted to isolating the healthiness inherent in cocoa and its chocolate off-shoots.

The Swiss have the highest per head spend, at about $110, per year, Mintel observed, nearly twice that of the UK, which is the next closest at about $56 per head. Belgians spent about $50 per head, Poles about $23, the Japanese about $18 and the Chinese less than $1 per head per year.

You can read all four episodes of functional chocolate from these links:

Markets: functional chocolate finding its feet

Science: Getting to the heart of chocolate’s benefits

Supply: Sourcing heart healthy chocolate

Regulation: the rules governing healthy chocolate