ChoViva, a cocoa-free chocolate alternative, is tested and processed by Planet A Foods’ lab employees. Hide caption by NPR’s Sandra Singh
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Sandra Singh (NPR)
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MUNICH — A few years ago, food scientist Sarah Marquardt stumbled upon a fact that stopped her in her tracks.
Marquardt was leafing through a book by ecologist Rob Dunn called “Never Out of Season.”
She read that more than half of the world’s cocoa bean supply comes from two African countries, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, and both countries, located just north of the equator, are facing more extreme weather events caused by climate change.
“The problem is that cocoa comes from a very small area, and the plant is very sensitive to climate change,” Marquardt says.
Thijs van Klaveren, a bioprocess engineer at Planet A Foods, checks samples in the company’s lab, which specializes in cocoa butter and fat substitute research. Hide caption by NPR’s Sandra Singh
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Last year alone, both Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana experienced record rainfall ahead of the autumn cocoa harvest, causing fungal infections on the trees and rotting of the pods, reducing global supplies of the beans, leading big chocolate makers to stockpile beans and causing raw cocoa prices to more than triple in a year.
The shortage has led to the rise of companies like Planet A Foods, which Mr. Marquardt co-founded with his brother, Max Marquardt, whose scientists have been working for the past three years to develop a chocolate alternative.
It takes time to create foods that look like chocolate, feel like chocolate, taste like chocolate, but aren’t actually chocolate.
Anna-Lena Klug, a food scientist at Planet A Foods, estimates that she and her colleagues tweaked the recipe “700 to 800 times” before arriving at Chobiva, a bean-free chocolate alternative.
A Planet A Foods lab worker tests and processes Chobiva. Sandra Singh, NPR Hide caption
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“If you’ve ever eaten raw cocoa beans, you’ll notice that their aroma has little to do with traditional milk chocolate,” Klug says.
That’s because chocolate’s flavor develops during the fermentation and roasting of cocoa beans. Klug and his colleagues experimented with the fermentation and roasting of more than 100 different ingredients, including apricot pits, olive kernels, jackfruit seeds, and potato skins, before finally settling on oats and sunflower seeds.
“By using oats and sunflower seeds instead of cocoa beans, we had to ensure that the fermentation and roasting stages produced the same aroma profile,” Klug says.
At the company’s Munich facility, they mix fermented and roasted oats and sunflower seeds with milk, shea butter and other ingredients, then pour the brown mixture into a machine called a conche machine, which heats the mixture, dispersing the ingredients evenly and slowly releasing acids to give the chocolate texture and flavor.
After months of trial and error, Marquardt and her team sent the first version of ChoViva to tasters in 2021.
ChoViva is lab-tested and processed at Planet A Foods. Hide caption by NPR’s Sandra Singh
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Sandra Singh (NPR)
“For the first time in five months, we were getting positive feedback from customers,” Marquardt says. “They were saying, ‘Wow, this is amazing.'”
That same year, Marquardt joined Y Combinator, a Bay Area startup accelerator known for funding companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, and DoorDash. With the new funding and backing, the company began signing deals with major German retailers.
Max Marquardt, president of business operations at Planet A Foods, says Chobiva’s goal isn’t to replace chocolate entirely. Rather, it wants to replace chocolate in applications where it’s simply an ingredient in larger products, like candies like M&Ms and Snickers, as well as cereals and ice creams that contain chocolate chunks.
The Markwarts say that because Chobiva’s ingredients – mainly oats and sunflower seeds – don’t need to be transported long distances from a few locations, they can produce it at the same price as chocolate while significantly reducing global-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
A range of ChoViva treats on sale at a German supermarket. Hide caption by NPR’s Sandra Singh
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“Cacao beans are trees that only grow in a few countries, usually in an area called the cocoa belt around the equator,” says Sarah Marquardt, “It’s a very specific climate. Oats, on the other hand, can be grown basically anywhere in the northern or southern hemisphere, as long as it’s not too hot or too humid.”
Using locally grown oats and seeds also means using significantly less water than is needed to maintain cocoa trees, Marquardt said.
ChoViva’s success has prompted Marquart to research other products that could potentially replace palm oil, another ingredient with known environmental impacts. The company plans to commercialize a palm oil substitute within the next year, she said.
