The chocolate industry is in crisis Cocoa prices have doubled since the start of the year as plantations in West Africa — which produce 80 percent of the world’s cocoa — have been hit by droughts exacerbated by climate change. As a result, processing plants in countries including Ghana and Ivory Coast have shut down or reduced production, while major manufacturers have raised prices and cut sales estimates.
This recent crisis adds to other problems with chocolate production; cocoa is a major contributor to illegal deforestation, and there is evidence of child labor and slavery on cocoa farms in Africa and Brazil. Growing cocoa trees also requires a lot of water, even though only the seeds of the fruit are harvested.
One way to address these problems is to produce chocolate without using cocoa beans — the fermented seed of the cocoa tree. Cocoa-free chocolate is already available, but scientists around the world are searching for new ways to make it greener and healthier using new techniques and ingredients.
More sustainable alternatives
Finding the right ingredients, however, can take time. “Between our first prototype and our current formula, we had 500 iterations — and none of the initial product survived into the commercial product,” said Max Marquart of the German company Planet A Foods, which makes ChoViva, a chocolate alternative made from sunflower seeds and oats, as well as grape seeds, shea butter and sugar.
Planet A only supplies other manufacturers, including Swiss giant Lindt, and ChoViva is used as an ingredient in more than a dozen products sold in Germany. The company also makes cocoa powder and cocoa butter substitutes. “The powder is made with a process similar to fermentation, while for the butter we use a process similar to beer production, using specific yeast strains,” Marquart said.
He describes the manufacturing process as “short and sustainable,” as the ingredients are sourced close to the production facilities in the Czech Republic. For now, ChoViva is mainly used in chocolate snacks and cereals, not to make chocolate bars. “We are not competing with your Cadbury Milk or your pure chocolate bars, that is not our goal,” Marquart said.
Price, he added, is an important consideration when it comes to persuading people to switch from cocoa to cocoa-free chocolate. “There’s no point in trying to change people’s behavior — that wouldn’t work. You want to reach them by making it very easy for them: no change in taste, no change in price, but at the same time they get more sustainability, for free.”
Other companies have different recipes. “Instead of cocoa beans, we use soybeans sourced from farms in the U.K. and Europe, and then ferment them in a similar way to how cocoa farmers ferment their beans,” said Ross Newton, CEO of Nukoko, a British startup that hopes to launch domestically next year.
“We believe we are quite close to a traditional Ghanaian cocoa flavour profile. Aspects like texture and mouthfeel are a little easier to achieve because the fats and sugars help. Taste adjustment is a bit trickier, but because our process is so similar to real cocoa fermentation, we are able to get closer to the real cocoa flavour than anyone else,” added Newton.
Soybeans also have nutritional advantages, according to Newton. They are higher in protein and lower in fat compared to cocoa powder, and because of their ability to fix nitrogen in the soil, they can reduce the use of chemical fertilizers. While cocoa contains antioxidant compounds that can improve blood flow and reduce inflammation.
Newton believes chocolate alternatives will become a big part of the market in the next five years. “Climate modelling data shows that we could have around 25% of cocoa farms unable to supply the market. Replacing chocolate completely, or just mixing in alternative products, as we want to do, to reduce the overall cocoa content, could help with sustainability – but also with costs.”
Like the real thing, but in a lab
A different approach comes from cellular agriculture, in which cocoa beans are grown in a lab from a small sample of the real thing. “We take one or two cocoa beans and put them in a cell culture, giving them sugar, vitamins and water,” said Michal Beressi Golomb, CEO of Celleste Bio, an Israeli startup. “The cells then multiply until we have a large biomass; we harvest the cocoa butter and keep the cocoa powder.”
The company manufactured its first prototype late last year, after eight months of work. “We have managed to extract chocolate-grade cocoa butter and are the first in the world to achieve this using cell culture technology. It has the same chemical profile as traditional cocoa butter. It can be a direct replacement in the chocolate manufacturing process.”
However, the cost of producing cocoa butter this way is still prohibitively high, and there are regulatory hurdles to overcome before the product can be sold. “That will be in 2027, at cost parity,” Beressi Golomb said. Regarding approval, she said: “We will start with the US, which has a faster regulatory process. Europe and the UK have a backlog of applications.”
Compared to traditional cocoa bean production, growing them in a lab allows for greater control over the final product, according to Beressi Golomb.
“We are combining biotechnology, agritech and AI to create the ideal growth conditions for cells. We are using computer modeling systems that could lead to a variety of future products, such as having a higher melting point with cocoa butter so that chocolate can be sold in warmer climates, or a less bitter cocoa powder so that less sugar is added to the product.”
According to Beressi Golomb, to produce two tons of cocoa butter traditionally, four tons of cocoa pods are needed, using 2,000 trees and more than 9,290 square meters of land. The same amount can be produced in a laboratory using a 1,000-liter bioreactor with an area of approximately 1.4 square meters.
“We would never have to cut down a single tree again (to make way for cocoa plantations) — that’s a huge impact.”
Reducing waste
There are also ways to incorporate even more of the natural components of the cocoa plant into the manufacturing process. A study published this year shows that it is possible to make chocolate using only the cocoa pod, replacing traditional sugar with cocoa gel. This substitution has positive effects not only on sustainability, but also on the nutritional profile of the final product.
“We (typically) use very little of the fruit — it’s like growing a pumpkin to use only the seeds,” said Kim Mishra, a professor in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and lead author of the study.
The process involves grinding part of the husk into a powder and obtaining a juice from the pulp surrounding the seeds. Both components are usually discarded or composted and have little or no economic value to growers. When combined, they create a gel that can act as a sweetener.
“You make chocolate using only components of the fruit and not conventional crystallized sugar from beets. This increases the sustainability of the product because you convert more biomass from the cocoa tree,” Mishra added.
She says the texture of the final product is similar to high-percentage dark chocolate, but the sweetness is different, as it develops a little more slowly and has a fruity touch. Compared to sweetened chocolate, it has more fiber and less saturated fatty acids, she added.
The downside is that there are additional production steps to make the gel and a new regulatory process due to the use of parts of the pod that are currently not considered edible. But, the study notes, chocolate made this way would have a lower climate impact and provide opportunities for producers to diversify their income.
Perhaps the best way forward for the chocolate industry is not to reinvent its product, but simply to use more of what it already produces.
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This content was originally published in Lab-grown cocoa and fermented beans could be the future of sustainable chocolate on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
