Chocolate, but without the guilt? Why lab-grown cocoa and fermented fava beans could be the future
The chocolate industry is having a meltdown. Cocoa prices have doubled since the start of the year, as crops in West Africa — which produces 80% of the world’s cocoa — have been hit by droughts made worse by climate change. As a result, processing plants in countries such as Ghana and Ivory Coast have stopped or scaled down production, while major manufacturers have raised prices and cut sales estimates.
This recent crisis adds to other problems with chocolate production; cocoa is one of the leading drivers of illegal deforestation and there has been evidence of child labor and slavery in cocoa farms in Africa and Brazil. Growing cacao trees also requires a lot of water, yet only the seeds of the fruit are harvested.
One way to tackle these problems is to make chocolate without using cocoa beans — the fermented seed of the cacao tree. Cocoa-free chocolate is already available but scientists around the world are looking for new ways to make it greener and healthier, using new techniques and ingredients.
Greener alternatives
Finding the right ingredients, however, can take time. “Between our first prototype and our current formula, we’ve had 500 iterations — and nothing from that initial product has survived into the commercial one,” said Max Marquart of German company Planet A Foods, which produces 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 chocolate powerhouse Lindt, and ChoViva is used as an ingredient in over a dozen products sold in Germany. It also makes cocoa powder and cocoa butter substitutes. “The powder is made with a fermentation-like process, while for the butter side we use a process that is similar to beer brewing, using specific yeast strains,” said Marquart.
He defines 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 cereal, rather than to make chocolate bars. “We’re not coming after your Cadbury Milk or your pure chocolate bars, it’s not our aim,” Marquart said.
Price, he added, is a major consideration when it comes to getting people to switch to cocoa-free chocolate. “It doesn’t make any sense to try to change people’s behaviors — that wouldn’t work. You want to reach them by making it very easy for them: no change in flavor, 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 fava beans sourced from farms across the UK and Europe, and then we ferment them in a similar way that cocoa farmers ferment their cocoa beans,” said Ross Newton, CEO of Nukoko, a UK-based startup that aims to launch on its domestic market next year.
“We think we’re pretty close to a traditional Ghanaian cocoa flavor profile. Stuff like texture and mouthfeel are a little bit easier to achieve, because the fats and sugars help. Flavor matching is a trickier spot, but because our process is so similar to actual cocoa fermentation, we can get closer than anyone else to actually matching real cocoa flavor,” Newton added.
Fava beans also have nutritional advantages, according to Newton, as 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. Although cocoa contains antioxidant compounds that can improve blood flow and reduce inflammation.
Newton thinks that chocolate alternatives will become a huge part of the market over the next five years. “The climate modeling data shows that we could be looking at around 25% of cocoa farms not being able to actually supply the market. Replacing the chocolate completely or just blending in alternative products like we want to do, to bring down the overall cocoa content, can 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 starting from a small sample of the real thing. “We take one to two cocoa beans and we put them in a cell culture, giving it sugar, vitamins and water,” said Michal Beressi Golomb, CEO of Celleste Bio, an Israeli startup. “Then, the cells multiply and multiply until we obtain a large biomass; we harvest the cocoa butter and we’re left with the cocoa powder.”
The company manufactured its first prototype product late last year, after eight months of work. “We’ve been able to extract chocolate-grade cocoa butter and we’re the first in the world to have been able to do so using cell culture technology. It has the same chemical profile as traditional cocoa butter. It can be a drop-in replacement in the chocolate manufacturing process.”
However, the cost to make cocoa butter this way is still prohibitively high and there are regulatory hurdles to clear before the product can be sold. “That’s going to be 2027, with cost parity,” said Beressi Golomb. Regarding approval, she said, “We’re going to 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 it in a lab allows for greater control over the final product, according to Beressi Golomb. “We’re combining biotech, agritech and AI to create the optimal growing conditions for the cells. We use computational modeling systems that can lead to a variety of products in the future, like having a higher melting point with the cocoa butter so chocolate can be sold in warmer climates, or a less bitter cocoa powder in order to put less sugar in the product.”
To produce two tons of cocoa butter traditionally, Beressi Golomb said, four tons of cocoa pods are required, using 2,000 trees and over 100,000 square feet (9,290 square meters) of land. The same amount can be made in a lab using a 1,000 liter bioreactor with a footprint of about 15 square feet. “We’d never need to cut down a single tree again (to make way for cocoa plantations) — that is an enormous impact.”
Cutting waste
There are also ways to incorporate even more natural components from the cocoa plant into the manufacturing process. A study published this year shows it’s possible to make chocolate using only the cocoa pod, by replacing traditional sugar with a cocoa gel. The switch has positive effects not just on sustainability, but on the nutritional profile of the end product.
“We (normally) use very little of the fruit — it’s like growing a pumpkin to only use the seeds,” said Kim Mishra, a lecturer at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology of the Swiss 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 that surrounds the seeds. Both components are usually discarded or composted, and have little to no economic value for growers. When combined, they create a gel that can act as a sweetener. “You make chocolate using only components from the fruit and not conventional crystallized sugar from sugar beets. This increases the sustainability of the product because you convert more biomass from the cacao tree,” Mishra added.
He says that the texture of the final product is similar to high-percentage dark chocolate, but the sweetness is different as it develops a bit more slowly and with a fruity touch. Compared to sugary chocolate, it has more fiber and less saturated fatty acids, he added.
The downside is that there are added 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 smaller climate impact and provide opportunities for diversification of the farmers’ income.
Perhaps the best path forward for the chocolate industry might not be to reinvent its product, but just use more of what it already produces.
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