RUSSIA: This is the story of a very special chocolate biscuit. It looks like any other chocolate biscuit. It tastes like any other chocolate biscuit. But - a world first - this biscuit is made from blood chocolate.
"We have a marketing problem," acknowledges its inventor, Prof Ludmila Antipova at Russia's prestigious State Technological Academy in Voronezh.
She has high hopes that her invention will put Voronezh, a pretty town in southern Russia, on the map, but acknowledges that blood chocolate has a major image drawback.
Several years ago Prof Antipova pondered a simple problem (the squeamish should stop reading now).
Every day, millions of gallons of blood drain away from cows and pigs in the world's abattoirs.
About half the blood of each slaughtered animal is thrown away in order that our steaks are palatable.
Black pudding is the traditional answer, but Prof Antipova wanted to go further.
And so her chemists broke down the blood into its constituent parts, isolating proteins, the same proteins that are used to make a cow's milk.
They were recombined with bacteria, sugar, fat and all the other nonsense that goes into chocolate and, hey presto: chocolate substitute.
Taste tests showed nobody could tell the difference between milk chocolate and blood chocolate, and the process expanded into other things, including substitute yoghurt.
"White blood cells," she explains helpfully.
And it's true, the taste is the same, obviously because the protein component is the same.
In fact, it is better. "Yoghurt has 2 or 3 per cent protein, this has 6 per cent," she tells me. Ideal for hospital patients who need high protein and easy to absorb.
Food companies, she was sure, would come running. "When people are told beforehand that this is made from blood, there is this barrier," she says.
"But if you don't tell them, they cannot spot the difference."
Changing rules have delayed her process getting a health licence from the Moscow Academy, but she expects success.
A specialist food company has agreed, subject to academy approval, to process 20 tonnes of blood a day into high-protein supplements.
But the big food companies have stayed away, worried about whether an advert showing a cow draining blood is as appealing as showing one being milked.
For the moment, a great Russian invention sits undiscovered, but the scientists in Voronezh remain optimistic.
"Everything that is new is scary at first," says researcher Alexei Nicolae. "Have another biscuit."