Allison Brown, PhD is a Senior Scientist in Cocoa Science at The Hershey Company.
She earned a BS in Food Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, during which she studied abroad at Zamorano University in Honduras—an experience that dramatically changed her life. In 2008, she received an Accelerated Culinary Arts Certificate from the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone.
After working in the wine industry, she switched her focus to cocoa and chocolate and earned her MS in Food Technology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, where she studied the physical properties of chocolate. Allison then spent 1.5 years at Ghent University in Belgium, researching cacao fermentation and sugar replacement in chocolate.
Her research follows chocolate along the entire supply chain, from cacao tree to chocolate bar.
She earned her PhD at Penn State in 2021 in a dual-title degree in Food Science and International Agriculture and Development. The international development portion of her work focused on understanding the impact of an in-country sensory panel on Honduran cocoa quality. The bulk of her research used sensory science and chemistry to characterize the flavor, taste and mouthfeel sensations of cocoa liquor resulting from different Theobroma cacao cultivars.
Allison’s consumer research looked at American premium chocolate consumer perception of craft chocolate and desirable product attributes using focus groups and projective mapping.
