Chocolate Lovers: Get A Whiff of This

Once upon a time, a young physics concentrator with a penchant for cakes and a talented artist with a smile as big as his tower of hair flew to Paris on a mission to unveil inhalable chocolate to the world. By day they scoured the finest boutiques in Paris for chocolate to use in their product. Money was no object. By night they stayed in a beautiful hotel near the Louvre. When they had all their supplies, the artist and the scientist hand-ground chocolate in preparation for their invention’s big reveal. The day finally came. In the corner of the dark, smoky gallery, the artist and the scientist unleashed “Le Whif” onto the world. “Orange or Gingerbread?” they asked.

Which is more fantastical: the existence of inhalable chocolate or the implausible story behind it?

It all started in the fall of 2007 when my former roommate Larissa H. Zhou ’10, the physics concentrator, and Trevor J. Martin ’10, the artist, signed up for Professor David Edwards’ class Engineering Sciences 147: “Idea Translation: Effecting Change through the Arts and Sciences.” Edwards, who made his name and fortune by inventing an inhalable tuberculosis vaccine, began teaching this course to inspire students to think outside the boundaries of academic disciplines, with the goal of demonstrating how a specific idea might be transformed into reality, taking social, cultural, and economic concerns into account. Students need not actually follow through on these development plans, although many do. Lebônê, the project to bring sustainable lighting solutions to Africa that recently won a $200,000 World Bank grant, was born in Edwards’ class.

Students are free to choose from a variety of group projects, which are based on the work of experts that visit the class every week. The year that Zhou and Martin took ES 147, Inhalable Food was one of the options. Zhou jumped at the topic because of her culinary passions, and Martin, because his graphic design experience would be invaluable for marketing. Travis May ’09, an economics concentrator, and Jonathan Kamler ’07, a physics concentrator who had taken Edwards’ class the year before and stayed to do post-grad work in the Idea Translation Lab, also joined the team.

Their brainstorming sessions in the Lowell dining hall were straight out of Willy Wonka. “We imagined neurocircuitry that would bypass the mouth altogether and target different parts of the brain for different smell and taste sensations,” Zhou said. “People would wear a helmet. There could be a pole attached to the ceiling. It would be like bumper cars.”

They envisioned a room full of bubbles in which people could simply open their mouths and taste everything from rhubarb pie to artichokes as the bubbles popped. But the bubbles’ lipid membranes were too weak to support imbedded particles. They tried tea. They tried mint. They tried a chocolate hookah—but the flour-filled prototype left May coated in white and wheezing.

By November, the group had still failed to come up with a viable product. Martin suggested using pipettes as a temporary solution: “We could stuff them and people could squeeze them.” Suddenly Kamler jumped. “My God, we have those inhalers!” he realized, referring to those that Edwards had developed for the TB vaccine. “Why didn’t I think that before?”

The group moved quickly to produce inhalable chocolate, which they called Le Whif. Martin and May were in charge of marketing and packaging while Zhou and Kamler handled the science. The team ground chocolate endlessly using a mortar and pestle Martin happened to have for an art project. (Eventually they’d graduate to dining hall knives.) By December they had the prototype for their inhaler (“Guard it with your life!” Zhou remembers Kamler warning.).

Le Whif, simply put, is an inhaler that contains about a gram’s worth of extremely tiny particles of chocolate. The holder is about the size and shape of a cigar, with colored tips that indicate the specific flavor inside. At one end of the plastic tube is a compartment that contains thousands of chocolate bits—small enough to aerosolize, large enough to linger in your mouth and not in your lungs. To use it, take a light drag—like a kiss, they say. The particles will pass through the filter and a fine cloud will coat the tongue and the roof of the mouth. Allow two to three seconds for the flavor to develop: subtly, but unmistakably, chocolate.

By January, Martin, Zhou, and Kamler had decided to stick with the project into the next semester. They were working towards a grand exposition of molecular gastronomy in the basement gallery of Le Laboratoire, Edwards’ playground and brain station. The expo, to be held on March 28, 2008, would star the chef Thierry Marx, famous for his ventures into molecular gastronomy with the chemist Jerome Bibbett; it would also feature the Harvard team’s inhalable chocolate.

The exposition, held in that dark, smoky gallery, treated the trendy French crowd to three-tiered bento boxes starring a suckling pear dipped in chocolate with a surprise mound of vanilla caviar nestled inside. A colloidal masterpiece. Sharing the stage was the Le Whif exhibition, which had paired with Nespresso, Nestle’s coffee line. The concept was to drink the coffee and take a puff. Pretty French girls draped themselves over the Nespresso deluxe machines. The clientele took light drags on the Whif. Zhou and Martin entertained frequent how-did-I-end-up-here thoughts.

“People were arguing over how much orange they could taste,” Zhou said. “I mean, if it weren’t in a minimalist, dimly-lit gallery where guests sipped champagne and savored macaroons, it would have been ridiculous. But ridiculous in a laughable and fantastical kind of way.”

Zhou paused, considering this statement. “It was eye-opening actually to see people take it that seriously. It’s about how powerful belief is, I guess. Whether it’s inhalable chocolate, or lighting Africa, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous or ambitious it seems. If you believe it, I think your passion can draw other people to it.”

Over the next few months, Kamler continued researching and refining Le Whif. The group’s whimsical story was immortalized in a manga comic, Whiff. Finally, a year after its unveiling, Le Whif is ready to hit stores. It will be available in four flavors—mango, raspberry, mint, and original—and will go on sale in Paris starting April 7 at both Le Laboratoire and Colette, a trendy shop in the 1. This product of divine inspiration, surreal no longer, will go on a world tour later this year.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Cooper can be reached at cooper3@fas.harvard.edu.