Alt-chocolate: How confectioners are finding more sustainable ways of producing chocolate

The benefits of ‘Alt-chocolate’ (as many people are now calling the alternatives to traditional cacao-based chocolate manufacturing) are obvious.

Alt-chocolate has much less impact on the environment, most notably because it emits up to 99% less carbon during the manufacturing process. They also use less water and do not involve any deforestation. There are often health benefits too, given some alt-chocolate options include less sugar and more fibre and protein than traditional chocolate.

Alt-chocolate production also avoids the traditional labour concerns that have surrounded cacao farming for centuries. These include unfair wages and child slavery, with a reported 1.56 million children being involved in cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana alone.

The rise of technology in the food industry has given birth to new players who are disrupting the traditional cocoa supply chain. These technological advancements are not only addressing the immediate supply chain issues, but are also paving the way for a more sustainable and ethical chocolate industry. Notably, two key technologies have emerged as particularly noteworthy: cell-based and fermentation-based methods.

What are the alternative ways to produce more sustainable chocolate?

From a legal perspective, if you use traditional fermentation processes to make your alt-chocolate, you will likely not have to obtain regulatory approval for your products, which makes progress easier and more certain. That said, regulatory approval still proves tricky for some manufacturing processes, for example, with cellular agriculture products.

Cell-based chocolate is produced by isolating cells from cocoa plants and cultivating them to produce the cocoa compounds needed to make chocolate. It’s a fairly straightforward process in biotech terms; you extract the cells from a cacao bean, grow them in a nutrient-rich solution, transfer the cells to a bioreactor that can replicate the natural conditions of a rainforest, and then collect, ferment, dry, and roast the cells for use in the production of bars, cakes, cookies, spreads, or chips.

With fermentation, you can use ingredients like carob and fava beans within a controlled fermentation process involving microorganisms like lactic acid bacteria and yeast in a very similar way to the traditional method of making chocolate. The microorganisms ferment the sugars, and the duration and conditions can be tweaked to optimise the results.

There are, however, notable challenges to producing alt-chocolate.

Replicating the taste we all associate with chocolate is the main one. Unless this is successfully tackled, consumers are likely to remain wary of alt-chocolate, which will impact widescale adoption. Also, while cocoa cells are easier and cheaper to grow than, for example, cultivated meat, only a small percentage of chocolate is included in packaged goods, which means the cost of producing enough to achieve the required levels of chocolate in the final product could increase the sale price.

Many startups and scaleups are already working intensely to solve the riddle of alternative chocolate. Continued innovation and new technology are of course needed. However, in a field where funding is definitely needed (and this is a highly attractive area for investors, given the capital raised for this area has reached $309m since 2014), IP has a vital role to play, not only in terms of protecting and commercialising innovation, but also in terms of attracting the funding needed to keep driving both these new and emerging technologies forward.

We are looking forward to seeing how cell-based and fermentation techniques develop to produce more sustainable chocolate products (not to mention tasting the results), but if you are involved in foodtech innovation and would like to discuss how you can use IP to maximise the value of your business, please contact our dedicated foodtech team.