With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, grocery store shelves are lined with heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. Chocolate is one of the most popular foods worldwide, with the average American eating around 12 pounds of chocolate a year.
However, there are several issues with how cocoa is currently farmed, including environmental destruction through deforestation, climate change, and the prevalence of child labor in the industry. As cocoa becomes more and more expensive, many people are looking for alternatives. Today, I want to cover some of the companies that are developing sustainable chocolate alternatives.
Figa Foods invites you to meet cupuaça, “chocolate’s Brazilian cousin”. The cupuaça is one of many superfoods from the Amazon rainforest. A close relative of traditional cacao plants, cupuaça is described as tasting like “chocolate with hints of tropical fruit”.
While eating the fruit of the cupuaça is quite common, the seeds are typically discarded. Figa Foods has found a way to repurpose those seeds into a healthy, caffeine-free chocolate alternative. Additionally, cupuaça pods fall naturally to the ground when ripe and can be easily gathered by hand, meaning there is no harm done to the tree during collection.
The KAWA Project is repurposing spent coffee grounds into a cocoa powder alternative. This is done by allowing the coffee grounds to ferment with microorganisms, which creates a deeper, more “chocolate-like” flavor. This powder is then used in place of cocoa powder in baked goods and beverages.
Approximately 6 million tons of coffee grounds are thrown away each year globally. The Kawa Project offers a solution to dealing with some of this waste. Upcycling the waste into something new ensures there is no additional environmental destruction and deforestation to produce this product.
Nukoko is a chocolate alternative made from European fava beans. According to their website, a unique protein called “vivilin” found in both beans is the key. Fava beans are naturally nitrogen-fixing crops, reducing the need for fertilizers and promoting soil health. Similar to the process used with cacao beans, nukoko uses fermentation to allow the fava beans to develop a rich flavor. The beans are then dried, roasted, winnowed, and ground into a powder that can be used in place of cacao powder when making chocolate.
THIC (This Isn’t Chocolate) and NOTCH (Not Chocolate) are two companies working to turn spent brewer’s grains into chocolate. Spent brewer’s grain is a byproduct of the production of beer, and over 40 million tons are produced each year globally. Currently, some of the spent giant is recycled into animal feed. Beer production isn’t going anywhere, so finding ways to reuse the byproducts of the process, THIC and NOTCH are hoping to keep even more of that waste out of landfills by upcycling it into a cocoa alternative.
All of these alternatives to cocoa use traditional chocolate production methods, meaning that already existing machinery and manufacturing techniques can simply be repurposed to produce these alternatives instead.
