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The real-life Willy Wonkas of confectionary are racing to cut the use of expensive cocoa. Their creations are delicious, but there’s a downside, too. Share this article It was a brownie in Amsterdam that opened my mind to the future. No, I wasn’t lounging in one of the city’s famous coffee shops. I was in the pristine pastel-toned laboratories of ofi, a food-ingredients business that’s leading the charge to use less cocoa when making chocolate. If the brownie is anything to go by, their stuff doesn’t just cost less. It tastes better, too, to my palate anyway. I was being shown around by two employees, Talia Profet and Pilar Darre, who proudly ushered me through a series of rooms, including a baking area, a confectionery room and a sensory and analytics lab. There, gadgets and gizmos measure everything from the color to the particle size of cocoa powder. Machines temper chocolate, and there’s even a device that gently jiggles the molds to eliminate air bubbles. If you think being around confectionary every day would make you sick of it, ofi’s European head chef Profet demurs. When running through the flavors and ingredients of various fine chocolates — a chai-spiced thin of vegan white chocolate, a tea-flavored bonbon colored gunmetal grey — her eyes light up like Charlie Bucket, even if she’s more Willy Wonka. Profet isn’t alone in loving the sweet stuff. Europeans like me are committed chocoholics. The continent leads in both production and consumption. The Swiss and Danish reportedly devour about 10.5 kilograms (23 pounds!) per capita annually. But, as the world discovered earlier this year, when this voracious appetite meets a supply crunch, trouble ensues. After hovering mostly between $1,000 and $3,000 per metric ton for decades, cocoa prices rocketed to about $12,500 at the end of last year. Bad weather, blight and aging trees combined to cause massive crop failures in West Africa, where roughly 70% of the world’s cocoa is grown. Illegal mining, driven by soaring gold prices, has also ravaged small-scale farms in Ghana. Although prices have moderated, I don’t believe this crisis is at an end. Cocoa remains much more expensive in nominal terms than ever before in recorded history. Unless there are profound changes in how and where it’s grown, there’s no reason to expect a return to steady, lower prices. No wonder the confectionary industry is rushing to limit its exposure. And the efforts of companies like ofi are genuinely impressive: Its miracle brownie contained one-fifth less cocoa than a normal one and tasted infinitely more chocolate. Other companies are taking things even further. Two staples of British kids’ lunchboxes, the Club and Penguin biscuits, must now be described as “chocolate-flavored,” since they contain more palm and shea oil than cocoa. All in all, the cocoa in many of our favorite treats is shrinking fast. And yet, there are larger issues at play here than reducing input costs for big food companies or catering to fussy Western palates. Like other important parts of global agriculture, cacao farmers have been struggling for years with problems running from biodiversity loss to personal poverty. Now, they can add frequent extreme weather and the spread of disease and pests to the list. “Climate change just makes things even worse,” Tonya Lander of the University of Oxford’s biology department told me. West Africa experienced extreme rainfall in 2023 that was more than double the 30-year average. That led to an outbreak of black-pod disease, a fungal infection that loves humidity and makes rotten mush of rugby ball-sized cacao fruits. Then, there was extreme humid heat in 2024, an event 10 times more likely in today’s warmer world, according to a World Weather Attribution study. The food industry’s hunt for alternatives is a rational response to all of this. But with China and India both succumbing to chocolate’s charms, it’s unlikely the efforts will be anywhere near enough to feed the ravenous demand. What’s also essential is a plan to help already beleaguered cocoa farmers mitigate the worst effects of climate change — and make enough money to live on. Taste-Testing Chocolate Alternatives As chocolate prices have changed, makers have adapted in two main ways: either “shrinkflation,” where the bars get smaller for the same price, or mixing up the recipe. As a leading cocoa trader and processor — and supplier of the ingredients ultimately used by the confectionary brands — ofi has had a surge of interest in the latter approach. Its chief innovation and quality officer, Kamesh Ellajosyula, told me its customers want recipes that “maximize the cocoa” available. For some products, ofi offers different coatings to deliver the same taste hit without loading the treats with cocoa. Using “fillers” like nuts or flavorings is another option. Vegetable oils are taking the place of cocoa butter. As well as the brownie, I did a blind taste test of two chocolate ice creams. One had 30% less cocoa powder in it than the other, but the difference in color, taste and texture was almost imperceptible. The only subtle variation I could pick out was that the adulterated one packed more of an upfront cocoa hit, and the other had a richer, longer finish. The former gets its punch from using more heavily “dutched,” or alkalized, cocoa. It’s also what made that magical brownie taste so chocolatey. Dutching was invented by a Dutch chemist, Coenraad J. Van Houten, who found treating cocoa with alkalizing agents such as potassium carbonate made it easier to dissolve in water. It also darkens the color and smooths out the bright, acidic taste of natural powder. Take it to the extreme and you get ultra-processed black cocoa, which you’ll recognize in Oreos with their almost earthy flavor and nearly black hue. There’s a limit, though, on how alkaline cocoa can be. As well as potentially losing desirable flavor notes, brands have to label the agent on their ingredients once a certain alkalization level is hit. That’s unappealing in an era when consumers are shunning ultra-processed food. Plus, dutching kills off many of the healthy antioxidants found in cocoa. Other confectionary giants are more interested in going cocoa-free. Mondelez International Inc. has helped fund Israeli food startup Celleste Bio, which wants to produce lab-grown cocoa. London-based Win-Win has raised money to scale up its barley, rice and carob-based chocolate alternatives. (The last is a seed pod from a tree grown mainly in the Mediterranean.) The company has a distribution deal with German bakery supplier Martin Braun. Munich’s Planet A Foods is one of the more developed alt-chocolate startups, raising $30 million in December to produce more of its ChoViva, a sunflower-seed based alternative chocolate. It processes the seeds in a similar way to cocoa beans, fermenting and roasting them to get a comparable flavor. Planet A’s chief technology officer, Sara Marquart, explained to me that sunflower seeds were chosen because there are vast quantities of them in Europe. Prices are also low and stable, and the nutrient load is similar to cocoa beans. Her product is already cheaper than the real stuff. Does ChoViva do the job? Reviews are mixed. Some consumers say it “tastes exactly like chocolate,” others that it’s “nothing like” it. Its first applications were in products where chocolate wasn’t the main event, such as ice-cream coatings, biscuits and peanut-butter cups, but it has sold to brands that use it in alt-chocolate bars. Overall, some 80 consumer products in eight countries including the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Japan feature ChoViva. Enough people seem to enjoy it to keep demand up. Cacao Farmers Are Suffering But one person’s pleasure can be another’s ruined livelihood. Thomas Cherico Wanger-Guerrero is an agro-ecologist at Agroscope, the Swiss agricultural researcher, and senior author of a 2025 study led by Oxford’s Lander which linked higher temperatures to lower cacao yields. He told me he worries what the impact of cocoa-free chocolate will be on the five-to-six million small-scale farmers who grow more than 90% of the world’s supply. If the big brands embrace alternative or lab-grown chocolate varieties because they’re cheaper or supply is more stable, then how do growers make money? There will always be demand for posh artisanal chocolate, but it only accounts for 5% of global production. Planet A’s Marquart insisted ChoViva isn’t trying to replace chocolate, rather that it wants to be a “second pillar to depressurize the supply chain.” India and China’s newfound fondness for the bean means shortages won’t be solved by alt-chocolate’s rise. China, always on the look out for secure supplies, has started growing cacao trees, but so far on a tiny scale that won’t satisfy potentially 2.8 billion Asian chocolate lovers. Marquart’s argument is that the dire state of cacao producers long predates the creation of firms like hers, and there’s plenty of room for all varieties. “Before a solution like ours gets blamed for driving farmers out of business, we have to look at all the past decades of inefficient practices, price pressuring farmers and mankind ruining the climate,” she said. That’s the crux of cocoa’s predicament. Growers have been underpaid, leading to huge structural challenges. With most growers in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire not earning a living income and almost 60% below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line, they simply can’t make the investments to shore up supply. Their trees are old, meaning yields are dropping, and they’re vulnerable to stress. A freshly planted cacao tree takes at least three years to begin bearing fruit. That’s an eternity for a small-scale farmer to go without income. It’s up to governments and business to implement fixes. The Oxford study found multiple ways to improve yield, such as planting shade trees to reduce heat stress in cacao crops, maintaining leaf litter to nurture tiny pollinators and hand-pollinating. The problem is these things cost money. Ghana has raised the fixed price paid to farmers by more than 12% for the upcoming 2025-26 season. Sadly, this could decrease in future. Farmers need to be able to think beyond the short term. Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch manufacturer set up to protest against child exploitation and slavery in the industry, has tried to solve the problem by paying a management fee to partner cooperatives of about $53 (€46) per metric ton and committing to five-year partnerships so coops can plan for longer. Belinda Borck, a policy official at Tony’s, said the benefits became clear in 2024: Co-ops that the company had been working with for more than five years suffered a much shallower yield decline than newer partnerships. Ofi, in the meantime, has ambitions to give greater support to one million farmers and to get 200,000 households a living income by 2030. Its interventions are being tailored to local needs, helping growers plant shade trees in West Africa or investing in irrigation for cocoa in Sumatra. These are admirable initiatives. Others in the industry must do their bit as well. The nature of technological progress makes it inevitable that alt-chocolate is here to stay, in the same way that it’s become commonplace to gorge on a passable meat-free burger. But as the sweet-toothed legions of chocoholics spread East as well as West, we’ll need all the supplies we can get. The lure of luxury goods will always sustain the attractions of the genuine article. And for the growers, of course, this is existential. To avoid the worst of all worlds, in which the production of real cocoa collapses altogether, the changes have to happen from the ground up. Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.
