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MUNICH — A few years ago, food scientist Sara Marquart came across a fact that stopped her in her tracks.
Marquart was paging through the book Never Out of Season, by ecologist Rob Dunn.
She read that more than half the global supply of cocoa beans comes from two African countries — Ivory Coast and Ghana — and that both countries, which lie just north of the equator, are facing more extreme weather events driven by climate change.
"You have a bit of a problem [in] that it's a very small region that all the cocoa is coming from, and secondly, you have a plant, cocoa, that is very susceptible to climate change," Marquart says.
Just last year, both Ivory Coast and Ghana received record rainfall prior to the autumn cocoa harvest. That left fungal tree infections and rotting cocoa fruit, and the global supply of cocoa beans dwindled. Big chocolate manufacturers stockpiled beans, and the price for raw cocoa more than tripled in a single year.
This shortfall has set the stage for companies like Planet A Foods, which Marquart founded with her brother, Max Marquart. The company's scientists have been working on a chocolate substitute for the past three years.
Making a food that looks like chocolate, feels like chocolate and tastes like chocolate — but isn't chocolate — takes time.
Anna-Lena Krug, a food scientist at Planet A Foods, estimates that she and her colleagues tweaked the recipe "between 700 and 800 times," before arriving at what they call ChoViva, a chocolate alternative that discards the cocoa bean.
"If you've ever had the chance to try a raw cocoa bean, you will realize that the aroma pretty much doesn't have anything to do with the conventional milk chocolate," Krug says.
That's because chocolate's aroma forms during the fermentation and roasting of the cocoa bean. Krug and her colleagues tried fermenting and roasting more than a hundred other ingredients, including apricot pits, olive kernels, jackfruit seeds and potato peels, until they finally settled on oats and sunflower seeds.
"Using oats and sunflower seeds instead of cocoa beans, we had to make sure that we still generate the same aroma profile with this fermentation and roasting step," Krug says.
At the company's Munich factory, Krug mixes the fermented and roasted oats and sunflower seeds with milk, shea butter and a few other ingredients and then pours the brown concoction into what's called a conche machine. It heats the mix, evenly distributing the ingredients and slowly releasing acids to arrive at the texture and flavor of chocolate.
After months of trial and error, Marquart and her team sent out their first version of ChoViva to taste-testers in 2021.
"That was the first time in five months after incorporation that we had positive feedback from customers," Marquart says. "They were like, 'Wow, this is amazing.'"
That same year, Marquart joined Y Combinator, a Bay Area startup accelerator known for funding companies like Airbnb, Coinbase and DoorDash. With fresh funding and support, the company began signing contracts with big German retailers.
The goal for ChoViva isn't to replace chocolate entirely, says Max Marquart, who runs the business side of Planet A Foods. Instead, he hopes to replace chocolate in applications where it's merely an ingredient in a larger product. He cites candies like M&M's and Snickers bars or even cereal or ice cream with chocolate chunks.
The Marquarts say they can produce ChoViva for the same price as chocolate, but with significantly lower emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide, because the ingredients that go into ChoViva — mainly oats and sunflower seeds — don't need to be shipped long distance from just a few locations.
"Cocoa beans are trees that usually only grow in what is called the cocoa belt around the equator, only in a few countries," says Sara Marquart. "It's a very specific climate. Whereas with oats, you can basically grow them everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere where it's not too hot and not too humid."
Drawing on locally sourced oats and seeds also means using significantly less water than what's required to sustain cacao trees, Marquart says.
ChoViva's success has led Marquart to explore another potential product, one that aims to substitute for another ingredient known for its impact on the environment: palm oil. She says the company plans to commercialize a palm oil alternative sometime in the next year.
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