When a food processor’s raw ingredient prices climb, they look for alternatives or ways to reduce the usage of that ingredient. That’s what is happening today with cocoa – prices have been climbing for the past two years, driven by rough weather in Africa and labor and supply chain problems. So processors that use cocoa are scrambling for solutions.
Cocoa prices for decades hovered between $2,000 and $3,000 per metric ton. But beginning in January of 2023, they began a climb that broke $12,000 a ton this April. While they’ve moderated since, at last glance the commodity was still trading above $8,000.
Fortunately, there is more than one way to reduce the cost of cocoa in a product.
Obviously, in an ideal situation, a food processor finds a one-to-one cocoa replacement that works well in a particular recipe. There are several cocoa replacements on the market today, so that’s a real possibility.
Another option is to adjust other ingredients, such as emulsifiers, to permit a reduction of cocoa in a recipe.
Finally – and probably most common – is a solution that combines various options in some fashion so that the product maintains its chocolatey characteristics with less actual cocoa in the recipe.
Regardless of the solution, food processors that rely on cocoa understand that the solution they develop now should be something that helps them for the long run and won’t be abandoned when, and if, cocoa prices fall.
“We are thinking about this way [beyond] the scenario we’re in right now, where there’s a crisis,” says Justin Demers, director of applications and product development for Prova USA (provaus.com), which develops customized solutions for food processors seeking to reduce cocoa. “For us, this is about long-term solutions and improving products in a lot of different ways.”
Cocoa is complicated
The underlying challenge with reducing or replacing cocoa in a recipe is that it is a complicated ingredient. It contains over 400 volatile compounds, ranging from alcohols and aldehydes to pyroles and pyrazines, so no single ingredient can replace it.
Contrast that to vanilla, another natural product that Prova has deep experience with. “In vanilla, there's a single molecule or compound called vanillin,” Demers says. “If you had that single compound and you smell that, you would say, oh, this is vanilla. In the cocoa world, that doesn't exist. So that makes it both complicated but also more flexible on our side.”
Demers explains that different elements within cocoa account for different tastes – pyrazine provides “roasty” nut flavors, while esters provide fruity notes, for example. That means that a food scientist attempting to emulate cocoa has lots of options to play with.
The various flavors “can be derived directly from cocoa, but we can also find them derived from other sources,” he explains. “And on a micro level, they're identical. They're the exact same molecules that we then stack and proportion in ways to create custom profiles.”
While that complexity opens the door to multiple options for emulating cocoa, it also means there no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to replacing cocoa. Naturally, that situation has led to several companies developing cocoa-similar ingredients.
Straight replacers
One company that has developed a cocoa replacement is Planet A Foods (planet-a-foods.com), based in Germany. The company began developing its solution in 2021, before the current cocoa price spikes. And reducing the cost was not the company founders’ intention -- they learned that demand for cocoa was causing mass deforestation, exacerbated by climate change, so they set out to create chocolate without cocoa.
Planet A’s cocoa-less solution involves processing oats and sunflower seeds in a fashion that emulates cocoa flavor.
“Many people don't know that actually 80% of the taste of chocolate doesn't come from the cocoa bean itself, but from the way the cocoa bean is processed, such as from the fermentation and roasting,” explains Jessica Karch, marketing and public relations manager for Planet A Foods. “So basically that's what we do with our oats and sunflower seeds as well. They're fermented and roasted, and that's how we get the chocolate taste.”
Planet A Foods launched its chocolate replacer, ChoViva, in 2023. ChoViva currently is an ingredient in chocolate-flavored cookies, peanut butter cups and cereal found on German and Austrian grocery store shelves. Karch says they are expanding distribution of ChoViva to other European countries this year and to the U.S. in 2025.
ChoViva’s ability to replace chocolate in any given product depends on the application, but in general it can be used in the same fashion as regular chocolate, Karch says.
“It’s of course a little bit dependent on the specific case, but in general you can use it just like chocolate,” she says. “It’s very, very similar and you can use it on the same production lines.”
ChoViva was not developed as a lower-cost solution to chocolate, but it may be, depending on the application and the cost of cocoa at any moment, Karch says. In any case, the supply of the product is more certain, she adds, since sunflower seeds are grown close to the company’s plants.
Another replacement product is ChocoUp from Alianza, based in Colombia but with a U.S. office in Durham, N.C. ChocoUp is a lipid product, made from palm and palm-based fractions, that is designed as a cocoa butter extender. Cost savings vary by application, but food manufacturers are saving money with the product, according to Maria Angelica Mashali, the company’s chief growth officer.
“When food manufacturers use ChocoUp, they can achieve results that closely match their original cocoa butter-only recipes, both in terms of flavor and functionality,” Mashali says. “It effectively blends with cocoa butter, preserving the crucial tempering properties required for chocolate production while also helping to prevent fat bloom, guaranteeing the chocolate maintains its visual appeal and delightful texture over time.”
Mashali adds that minor adjustments to recipes are required in some cases.
“To achieve the same texture, taste, and overall experience as the original cocoa butter recipe, a slight adjustment to the crystallization curve during tempering might be needed,” she says.
“Furthermore, the amount of ChocoUp used can vary based on the type of chocolate being made and the specific regulations in each country.”
T. Hasegawa also has developed a cocoa substitute. The company’s Cocoa Powder Replacer was designed specifically for beverage applications, and comes in both powder and liquid forms.
“Cocoa Powder Replacer is an alkalized, low-fat cocoa powder flavor that serves as a perfect substitute for traditional cocoa, reducing the amount needed without compromising taste,” the company says on its website.
Sometimes it’s the emulsifier
Reducing cocoa in a recipe does not always require using a cocoa substitute. In some applications, the amount of cocoa needed can be reduced by changing other ingredients.
For example, emulsifiers are commonly used in baked goods and other sweets coated with chocolate to improve the flow of the chocolate. Flow is also improved by an increased amount of cocoa butter, so a manufacturer seeking to reduce cocoa usage could opt to use more emulsifier instead of cocoa butter.
“PGPR is an [emulsifier] product that is commonly used in a lot of chocolate,” says Sheila Rice, key account director/regional marketing for Palsgaard. “And where it can come into play for reduction of cocoa butter usage is when you're trying to set the rheology of your product, or the amount of chocolate that you need if you're doing a coating or to get that nice flow property that you're trying to achieve.”
Rice explains that by using the right amount of PGPR (polyglycerol polyricinoleate), the manufacturer can achieve the desired flow rate without adding more cocoa butter.
“PGPR allows you to get to that level in a more efficient way because the cost per use is minimized with a smaller dosage of PGPR versus using cocoa butter,” she says. “And using additional cocoa butter not only adds cost, but it also adds calories. So it’s all about the complete formulation that a developer decides on.”
Another advantage of using an emulsifier in place of some cocoa butter is that doing so avoids some of the variability found in cocoa butter, Rice adds. A natural product such as cocoa butter may not always have precisely the same characteristics and/or may not perform consistently under different environmental conditions, while an emulsifier such as PGPR or lecithin should perform consistently at all times.
Complete solutions
Using a straight substitute for cocoa sometimes works, but in general, processed foods that include cocoa are too complicated for a simple solution. As in any situation, replacing an ingredient – especially one as complex as cocoa – in an existing recipe requires the processor to consider multiple other consequences.
For example, cocoa helps impart a certain mouthfeel to foods, and that cannot be ignored when a replacement is used in place of cocoa. And how cocoa interacts with the other ingredients in the food item must be considered when deciding on a replacement.
“Sometimes the reduction in cocoa, depending on the percentage, there are other things that are compromised beyond just the cocoa flavor,” Demers explains. “We have solutions where we can add back in raw materials that add certain mouthfeel qualities or that richness that a fat might be providing.”
Prova specializes in solutions that take all of those factors into account, Demers says. When a client asks for a cocoa replacement for a chocolate chip cookie, for example, Prova looks at the cookie holistically and develops a solution that reduces or replaces the cocoa while maintaining the other characteristics of the cookie. The cocoa may be reduced by using cocoa extracts, different natural flavors, or totally artificial flavors, depending on the situation and the amount of cost savings the food processor is seeking.
How much of a reduction in cocoa is feasible? Demers says a 30% reduction of cocoa can typically be achieved with minimal effect on the rest of the product’s recipe; higher reductions require more adjustments but are still feasible.
Even considering the cost of the other ingredients needed to replace the cocoa, a 30% reduction in cocoa may equate to important cost savings, especially right now. However, there is more to cost savings than simply reducing the quantity of cocoa in a given product, Demers stresses.
“I like to think of cost in more than just dollars and cents,” Demers says. “There's also production costs, right? There's opportunity costs, there's storage costs. If you're used to having storage for bags and bags and pounds and pounds of cocoa powder at your facility, and that can now be replaced with a much smaller amount of a flavor that saves space and time and money, you save money.
“Reducing complications in production also saves time and money. So it's more than just the dollars and cents of cost and use of that particular ingredient.”
Reacting to trends
The companies offering solutions to high cocoa prices are enjoying a wave of new business in this current environment.
Palsgaard’s Rice, for example, confirms that more companies are looking her company’s emulsifier solutions these days.
“We have more interest in people testing it now who had kind of casually looked at it before and said, ‘Oh, I don't know. It seems like it's good,’” Rice says. “The decision to deploy fully is a big decision, but the interest level for sure has gone up.”
What will happen if cocoa prices drop? Some manufacturers will naturally go back to their previous recipes, but the solutions developed during these high-cost times may have benefits -- such as improvements to the product’s shelf life or mouthfeel -- that appeal to manufacturers even when they are less concerned about cocoa costs.
“When things go back to normal, at the very least, we hope that your cost can be break even to where it was, but we're offering you a lot of other benefits as well along the way,” Prova’s Demers says. “So whether your product has a longer shelf life, or your product has a better mouth feel or whatever it is, we want it to be more than net zero in the end when the market stabilizes.”
Fermentation Could Be an Answer
As with most pricey ingredients, cocoa has become the focus of fermentation technology. At least two companies are developing processes to create cocoa by cell culturing.
California Cultured, a biotech company in Davis, Calif., is growing cocoa, as well as coffee, from cell cultures with the hope of selling some production quantities next year.
“The cells grow and multiply as we equip them with our broth of natural plant nutrients,” the company explains on its website. “Our cells live in large condition-controlled tanks that mimic the exact conditions of the rainforests in which cacao and coffee thrive. After about 3-4 days, our coffee and cocoa cells are ready to be harvested, fermented and roasted to bring out the complex flavors inherent in the cells.”
Three or four days, not the six months it takes for traditional cacao harvesting, much less the five years it takes for a cacao tree to mature enough to produce pods.
Over in Israel, “Celleste Bio has created a proprietary ‘cocoa technology’ that eliminates the industry’s costly reliance on fragile rainforests,” says the company website. “Our three-pronged model combines BioTech, AgTech and AI to produce 100% natural cocoa ingredients at scale, anywhere in the world. Without cutting down a single tree.”