< A hotter climate threatens chocolate. This German company invented a substitute

REGINA BARBER: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, it's Regina Barber here. It's Climate Solutions Week here at NPR, and reporters around the world are bringing you stories on this year's theme, food. For day 3, How We Eat, I've got one of NPR's international correspondents, Rob Schmitz, on deck. Hey, Rob, welcome to the show.

ROB SCHMITZ: Gina, thanks for having me.

BARBER: So I couldn't wait to talk to you today, Rob, because I heard you did some reporting on one of my favorite things in the world, chocolate.

SCHMITZ: Actually, I need to correct you already because this is a chocolate alternative. No cocoa beans were harmed in the making of this chocolate.

BARBER: I'm OK to be corrected. I'm still going to eat some of this not chocolate.

SCHMITZ: OK, good.

BARBER: Because I heard that there's lots of problems facing the chocolate industry right now, like climate change.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, that's right. More than half of the global supply of cocoa beans come from just two countries in Africa-- the Ivory Coast and Ghana.

BARBER: Right. So I learned from the last time our show covered chocolate that cacao trees are kind of like finicky, that they only grow within like 20 degrees north and south of the equator.

SCHMITZ: Yeah. And these two countries are subject to a lot of the increasingly extreme weather patterns that scientists expect to see in the region as climate change worsens, including record rainfall.

BARBER: Yeah, and that's related to why the price of raw cocoa, like, shot up quite a bit. Like, I read it's more than tripled in a single year.

SCHMITZ: So the record rainfall last year led to fungal infections among cacao trees and dwindled the supply of cocoa beans. Heat is also making it more difficult for cocoa beans to thrive. These factors have combined to lead to a massive price increase in the global supply. Meanwhile, chocolate companies move to stockpile cocoa beans.

BARBER: And this all set the stage for, like, food scientists to start cooking up a solution.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a problem I bet the suppliers of many different types of food are probably going to have to start thinking about. And so the solution in this situation was to create a type of food that tasted like chocolate, acted like chocolate, but did not use the cocoa bean, the essential ingredient of chocolate.

BARBER: So today on the show, re-envisioning chocolate in the face of climate change. We get into the food science behind this sweet climate solution and what it means for all of us chocolate lovers. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BARBER: OK, Rob. I really love chocolate. It's making me, like, super sad that supplies are going down. So I actually want to know more about these alternatives. I have some samples, like, right here that you actually got a company to send me. Thank you very much. I'm going to try them later, I swear. But, like, tell me first about going to this company and seeing, like, this alternative chocolate being made.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, so I visited the headquarters for a company called Planet A Foods, and it's run by a brother-sister team from Munich, Sara and Max Marquart. Sara is a food scientist and Max is a businessman. And a few years ago, Sara heard about these problems in the chocolate industry that I mentioned before. Most of the world's supply coming from two countries and that cocoa being threatened by climate change. And so they thought, hey, let's make a business that creates an alternative to chocolate. And they're calling it ChoViva.

BARBER: Yeah. So tell me, like, the timeline to develop something like this.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, so this was actually during the pandemic. And so everyone was on sort of lockdown. It was the early pandemic years, if you can remember back to that time.

BARBER: I can. I was alive.

SCHMITZ: [LAUGHS] So was I. And Sara has-- like, many of us, has a stand mixer at home. And she started to just mix random food, pieces of pits, seeds. I mean, she was trying jackfruit seeds. She was trying olive kernels, apricot pits. She was trying potato peels.

BARBER: Just stuff that reminded her of, like, cocoa beans?

SCHMITZ: Well, she's a food scientist. And what she's thinking about this as a food scientist, she's thinking about substitute foods or raw ingredients that would have a similar fat content as chocolate because she wants it to behave like chocolate. So she wants it to be able to melt at the same temperature as chocolate.

BARBER: Oh, right. No, that makes sense.

SCHMITZ: But she was also looking for taste. And so, you know, as a food scientist, she's looking at things like, you know, amino acids and proteins and things like that that might, you know, once they're fermented, once they're broken down in a process that releases enzymes and things like that, start to sort of match both the taste and aroma of what happens when a cocoa bean is fermented and roasted.

BARBER: Right. And you mentioned, like, amino acids. So let's talk about what's going on on the molecular level. Like, there are 20 of these, like, protein building blocks. And when we boil down, like, food composition, we're really thinking about proteins, fats, and carbs like sugar. And these are like the precursors to flavor, right?

SCHMITZ: Exactly. And when I talked to Sara, she said flavor is both the taste of something and the smell. So she thinks of combining ingredients is like sort of conducting a symphony.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

SARA MARQUART: We have a lot of instruments. And those have to play together. They have to make harmony. And the same is with cocoa and chocolate flavor. So it's not a single cocoa and chocolate flavor. It's often 20, 30, 40 different aromas. And so you have to be the maestro, tuning those aroma compounds to have then the impression of cocoa flavor.

[END PLAYBACK]

BARBER: So how many times did she have to do this to get, like-- to get this recipe right?

SCHMITZ: Hundreds. I mean, I don't think she counted, you know, 1, 2 on a piece of paper. But she told me that it was, in her estimate, 800 to 900 times. It could have been a lot more. And by the time she got to, you know, in the hundreds, I think she had sort of settled on two main ingredients to substitute for chocolate.

BARBER: OK.

SCHMITZ: These two main ingredients are sunflower seeds and oats.

BARBER: I mean, it sounds-- it sounds good.

SCHMITZ: You know, because I mean, I think she arrived at sunflower seeds primarily because it has a similar fat content as cocoa beans have. 50% of a sunflower seed is fat. And so it not only tastes in some ways like chocolate once it's fermented and roasted, it also behaves like it.

BARBER: Wow. OK. I mean, you had mentioned earlier before she kind of settled on this, like, sunflower seeds and milk and oats that she was trying, like, potato peels and like, what did you say? Jackfruit seeds. Are any other, like, companies doing that? Or like, can you tell me more about those kind of ingredients?

SCHMITZ: When I was looking at competition for ChoViva online, I noticed that at least one of the companies was using similar type of ingredients that she had used, but-- but one of them was using potato peels.

BARBER: That's wild.

SCHMITZ: And I think that there must be something in a potato peel that obviously works when you're looking at how chocolate tastes and how it behaves, even though, like, if I'm thinking of a potato peel, I mean, the last thing I'm thinking about is chocolate.

BARBER: Well, it makes me think of also just like waste, right? Like, if you can use these things to kind of like make other products, you're kind of-- what do they call it? Upcycling things.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, that's right. And I think in some ways, oats-- and sunflower seeds, for that matter-- you know, most places can grow these ingredients, whereas when you're talking about cocoa beans, you're only talking really about a handful of countries, and they have to be around the equator.

BARBER: Wow. I think I should try this. You've done this, right? Like, you've-- you've tasted it.

SCHMITZ: I have. I was actually in their-- their-- their headquarter kitchen. And I tasted it straight off the assembly line.

BARBER: That's like Willy Wonka stuff.

SCHMITZ: It is. Yeah, no, it was like being a kid in a chocolate factory.

BARBER: And again, I am a big dark chocolate fan, not a big milk chocolate fan. Definitely not a white chocolate fan, but I will try these peanut-covered ones soon. All right.

SCHMITZ: OK.

BARBER: So I'm looking at this chocolate bar. Looks very milk chocolatey. I'm going to try it.

SCHMITZ: What do you think?

BARBER: It's way better than I thought it was going to be.

SCHMITZ: Me too. I was shocked when I ate it because I was not expecting very much. And it did taste like a legit piece of chocolate.

BARBER: The initial taste and, like, breathing in-- you know, when-- when Sara is saying, like, taste and smell, like, it's almost like the experience is chocolate.

SCHMITZ: Yeah.

BARBER: And then it, like, sits in your mouth. And you're like, wait a minute, maybe it's not chocolate. And then-- and then like, there's like a third taste, and that one's like chocolate. Like, the aftertaste is kind of chocolatey.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, yeah.

BARBER: So, like, tell me what you learned about how this is, like, processed while you were there.

SCHMITZ: Yeah. So it's a complicated process. So they start by doing what's called pre-grinding, which is mixing all the ingredients more or less in a bowl. And then they grind it down even further. And then they take that mix. And they put it in what's called a conche machine. They actually have a nickname for theirs called Conchita.

BARBER: So cute.

SCHMITZ: So they put this into Conchita, and the conche machine not only grinds it down to less than 30 micrometers, which is super small, but it does so while heating it up. And this all gets to a sort of process called rheology. And this is a word that I did not know before I was on this assignment.

BARBER: I just looked it up. [LAUGHS] It's a branch of physics talking about basically deforming the material.

SCHMITZ: Yeah. I think what-- what the term "rheology" as applied to what they're doing to this chocolate mix is to try and mix these ingredients in an equitable way. So that when you taste even a corner of it, you're going to get the equal amount of every ingredient in that final product than you would if you ate another side of it. And then they put it on this wheel that's cooled. And they cool it down. And then after it gets on this wheel, all these shavings of what becomes ChoViva starts to fall out. And they do this a few times. And I actually was eating it straight off of that wheel from their kitchen

BARBER: That is so cool.

SCHMITZ: Yeah.

BARBER: But, like, now that they have this, like, delicious product, like, what now?

SCHMITZ: Yeah. So once they figured out that they had something, they started to look for money. And they went to Y Combinator, a business accelerator based in the Bay Area. The Y Combinator is pretty famous in the startup community globally because big companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, they all sort of started with this particular accelerator. Only 1% of startups actually make it through this process, and they made it.

BARBER: Wow.

SCHMITZ: And for them, that meant a lot of investment into their startup. And just a very short period of time later, they have contracts now with two of Germany's largest grocery chains, REWE and Edeka. And they're already putting their product, ChoViva, into a bunch of different types of products like peanut butter cups, cereal brands, you know, things like that.

BARBER: So, I mean, are they seeing themselves as, like, a real competitor or, like, a replacement for chocolate?

SCHMITZ: They're not thinking about it as replacing chocolate. They want it to be an ingredient in bigger products and not the main-- not the main food.

BARBER: So what's next for this company? You said that they've already started putting it in peanut butter cups, or they started doing, you know, putting it in cereals. But like, what-- what more do they want to do?

SCHMITZ: Yeah. So Sara and Max are now looking at other ingredients that could also go into this chocolate substitute. And some of those might be corn, rice, even grape seeds, which Sara thinks would work well for a darker chocolate alternative.

BARBER: I'm waiting for that.

SCHMITZ: Yeah. And I think I need to mention here also that, you know, part of the reason that they're doing this, too, is that when you're thinking about where oats, sunflower seeds, you know, grape seeds, corn, rice, where they all come from, you know, they can come from mass areas of land in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. And so a product like theirs, like ChoViva, could have lower CO2 emissions due to the fact that those ingredients are locally sourced.

BARBER: Oh, wow. OK.

SCHMITZ: Yeah. And it's also less water-intensive. Sara says that drawing on locally sourced oats and sunflower seeds can also mean using less water than what's required to sustain cacao trees.

BARBER: Wow. That's huge.

SCHMITZ: Yeah, Sara and Max are thinking not just about foods that are affected by climate change, but products that contribute to climate change, things like palm oil. They're working on an alternative for that now. And for me, all of this is huge. You know, the climate consequences for chocolate are here. They're clear. But unless serious changes are made to lessen our impact on the climate, the world will probably need a lot more alternatives, a lot more minds, retooling how we think about our food.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BARBER: Thank you so much, Rob, for one, letting me taste all these chocolates, getting these chocolates to me, but two, bringing us the story. Thank you so much.

SCHMITZ: Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

BARBER: Short Wavers, we'll drop a link in our episode notes if you want to check out more of NPR's Climate Solutions Week coverage. This episode was produced by Rachel Carson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer is James Willetts. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of Podcasting Strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BARBER: Do you think I should try these white chocolate ones to see if I hate them as much as white chocolate?

SCHMITZ: Totally. Yeah. Try 'em. Try 'em.

BARBER: OK. OK. They're good.

SCHMITZ: Really?

BARBER: Yeah.

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