Something’s wrong in Wonka Land. Chocolate bars are shrinking. Recipes are changing. Levels in the chocolate river are running low, and the very word “chocolate” is disappearing from wrappers. A sinister Roald Dahl twist? Sadly not. Cocoa is in crisis.
The defining ingredient in the world’s favourite sweet treats, grown only in a narrow band around the Equator, is taking a battering. Disease, climate change, years of underinvestment and falling production have sent prices soaring. Between late 2022 and 2024, the price of cocoa surged more than threefold from $2,367 (£1,790) per ton to a 45-year high of $11,984, according to the International Cocoa Organisation. Prices are easing for now, but cocoa still costs more than twice what it did in 2020. And it’s all taking a toll on the chocolate aisle.
Faced with huge costs, manufacturers are reformulating, swapping some of the cocoa in firm favourites for cheaper substitutes. As a result, some chocolate coatings have been officially downgraded to “chocolate-flavoured”. McVitie’s Penguin and Club bars, along with KitKat White and McVitie’s White Digestives, no longer meet the legal threshold to call themselves chocolate at all.
“Shrinkflation” is also biting hard. Mondelez International, which owns Cadbury, says it has reduced the size of some products as a “last resort” to keep them affordable; across the industry, bars and packets are downsizing while prices stay much the same. That Quality Street tin you’re looking forward to this Christmas? There will be less to squabble over because it’s roughly five chocs lighter.
But as the chocolate giants scramble to adapt, a new wave of scientists and entrepreneurs is racing to reimagine chocolate, replacing cocoa beans with unlikely raw materials, and keeping their methods firmly under wraps. It’s hardly surprising: with the global chocolate market worth more than $130bn (£100bn), a credible stand-in for cocoa would be close to striking gold. The question is whether anything can truly match the flavour, texture and deep nostalgia bound up in real chocolate, the kind made with cocoa.
Win-Win believes it is pretty close. The London-based firm makes cocoa-free chocolate from grains and legumes, including rice, fermented using a secret process. “By pairing this breakthrough technology with classic chocolate-making techniques like roasting, grinding, refining and tempering, we’ve unlocked a chocolate experience that is indistinguishable from conventional products, but with a dramatically lower environmental footprint,” says chief executive Mark Golder.
He’s not predicting the end of real chocolate, thankfully. “At the heart of the ongoing cocoa crisis is a fundamental imbalance – the world wants more chocolate than the planet and the current supply chain can provide,” Golder says. Chocolate alternatives can help close that gap, especially when used in mass-produced foods such as cakes, biscuits, ice cream and confectionery. “For some small businesses, the cost of cocoa can be the difference between surviving or not,” he adds.
German start-up Planet A Foods has developed an alternative made from sunflower seeds, using a fermentation process based on beer brewing. Like most cocoa-free chocolate, ChoViva is not only cheaper than the real thing but kinder to the planet, using less water and producing fewer carbon emissions while still tasting reasonably authentic.
What began as a kitchen experiment by food technologist Sara Marquardt and her brother Max during lockdown in 2020, ChoViva, is now a brand in its own right turning over tens of millions of euros a year, with 73 products available in eight countries. In the UK, it features in Aldi’s Dairyfine range and Candy Kittens’ vegan sweets. The company recently signed a long-term deal with Oxfordshire-based manufacturer Barry Callebaut, which supplies chocolate to culinary professionals globally, which will vastly expand its reach.
Sunflower seeds, Marquardt says, offer an ideal foundation for a chocolate alternative: they share key biochemical “building blocks” with cocoa, which means that with the right processing they can be coaxed into something convincingly chocolate-like.
They are also abundant, drought resistant and grown close to home – factors that slash ChoViva’s carbon footprint by around 80 per cent compared with conventional chocolate. “Sunflower seeds are also very affordable,” she notes. And despite the turbulence caused by the war in Ukraine – historically one of the world’s major suppliers – there’s still no shortage of seeds to keep the confectionery experiments going.
ChoViva is available as a powder and a meltable “chocolate” alternative for manufacturers to use in everything from ice cream coatings to chocolate bars. There’s a cocoa butter version in development, too, but EU red tape has slowed its progress to market: classed as a “novel food”, it can’t be sold until it clears a lengthy regulatory process.
Unlike rivals whose chocolate alternatives are designed to be used as “extenders” – a partial replacement for cocoa – ChoViva is intended as a complete like-for-like substitute, to help ease pressure on real chocolate supplies. “We believe strongly in our mission to have chocolate available to our kids and grandchildren in the future,” says Marquardt. “What drives us is making ingredients like this accessible and affordable for everyone.”
Italian company Foreverland is taking a different tack again, building its Choruba “chocolate” from waste products: carob pulp, grape seeds discarded by the wine industry, and a by-product of processed pumpkin seeds.
Carob has long been grown across the Mediterranean and used in sweets and syrups, but these days its seeds are prized by the ice cream industry, leaving the pulp as a plentiful by-product. Outside the region, carob is probably best remembered as the supposedly healthy – and for some of us, distinctly weird tasting – chocolate substitute of the 1970s. But Riccardo Bottiroli, Foreverland’s co-founder, says its secret fermentation and roasting process removes the carob flavour and results in a chocolatey and eco-friendly cocoa alternative.
“Carob doesn’t require any water other than rainfall to grow,” he says. “It’s drought resistant and widely available across the region.” Foreverland’s “chocolate” pieces and powders are now finding favour among manufacturers in Italy, Germany and France who see the appeal of a product made close to home from crops that demand little of the planet.
Britain is set to join the cocoa-free chocolate race, too. From its lab and test kitchen in Guildford, Nukoko is turning humble fava beans grown in the UK and Europe into something that looks, melts and tastes like chocolate, according to the company. Co-founder Ross Newton, who previously ran a chocolate company with fellow founder Kit Tomlinson, says the idea grew out of sheer frustration with volatile cocoa prices.
Together with plant biologist Prof David Salt, they began experimenting. “We tried hundreds of different types of legumes,” Newton says. “We needed a bean that was abundant locally so we didn’t have to transport it from the other side of the world.” They landed on fava beans, which have the added advantage of enriching the soil they are cultivated in, adding nitrogen. Once the beans pass through Nukoko’s closely guarded fermentation process, they are dried, roasted and ground just as cocoa beans are, into a fine powder that tastes nothing like fava beans but carries some of the layered flavour of chocolate.
How is it possible to mimic the flavour of cocoa, a complex bean containing more than a thousand compounds? Prof Salt explains that only a small fraction of them actually drive flavour. “There’s good literature where people have recreated the odour and taste of cocoa with 20 pure compounds,” he says. With the right processes, including fermentation and roasting, those key compounds can be developed in raw materials that aren’t cocoa at all. Many cocoa-free chocolates also contain natural flavours, such as vanilla, to round out the taste.
The first batches of Nukoko, due to reach the market early in the new year, will go to food manufacturers. “Lots of companies aren’t looking to completely replace cocoa,” Newton says. “They want to reduce their cocoa usage – for example, use 50 per cent Nukoko and 50 per cent cocoa.”
While Nukoko focuses on beans, Belfast-based biotechnologist Azhar Murtaza, the founder of food tech company Born Maverick, has looked to fruit for inspiration. His chocolate substitute, Betta Choc, is made with date seeds, an abundant by-product of one of the world’s oldest crops. He believes that his product has the edge over competitors because not only is it is naturally sweet and contains no added natural flavours, but it also contains the feel-good compound theobromine.
Murtaza’s method involves fermenting date seeds with a strain of mycelium, a fungus that quickly breaks them down, triggering chemical reactions that develop cocoa-like flavours. It’s also when theobromine – the compound that gives chocolate its subtle mood-lifting, energising effect – develops. “People eat chocolate because it makes them feel good, and that comes from theobromine,” Murtaza says. “It’s not added chemically; it’s done naturally within the fermentation process.”
He says powdered Betta Choc has been trialled by a chocolate multinational (he can’t reveal which one), for use as a replacement for 70-80 per cent of the cocoa in a well-known bar. “They loved it,” he says of the company, which offered to collaborate. He politely declined and is now in talks with the government of Saudi Arabia, where there’s no shortage of date seeds, in the hope of securing investment to set up production there.
Murtaza has deliberately designed his process to be low-cost, unlike some ventures in the United States and elsewhere now trying to grow cocoa in labs from scratch, in the same vein as cultured meat. “That’s hugely expensive,” he says. “How are they going to bring down the cost of that for mass consumers?”
Others disagree, arguing that this is the next chocolate frontier. In California, start-ups such as California Cultured are working to grow cocoa by reproducing cells from real beans in bioreactors. The idea is to create cocoa products with the same molecular structure as the genuine article, but in weeks rather than years, and without the diseases and droughts threatening tropical plantations. Similar work is under way in Israel at Celleste Bio, which calls its facilities “indoor cocoa farms”.
At the same time, big chocolate manufacturers aren’t giving up on cocoa altogether. In West Africa, where more than 60 per cent of the world’s supply is grown, scientists backed by Mars Inc and researchers at the University of California, Davis are racing to develop plants that can withstand soaring temperatures and disease. The goal is to future-proof cocoa by making it more resilient and less reliant on the shrinking regions where it can survive.
This is all part of a growing recognition that the era of cheap, abundant cocoa might be drawing to a close, and that the future of chocolate will hinge on science and innovation. But it might be years before lab-grown cocoa and climate-hardy trees can produce affordable beans on the scale needed to feed the world’s appetite for chocolate. In the meantime, as the new generation of producers is proving, crops grown far from the tropics can stand in for cocoa so convincingly that many consumers won’t notice the difference. And some chefs are embracing it, too.
Chantelle Nicholson, the founder of sustainable London restaurant Apricity, is a fan of Win-Win’s cocoa-free chocolate. “It’s a delicious ingredient and is very comparable to chocolate,” she says. The fruity notes work beautifully in fruit-based desserts, and the white version is “on par” with good white chocolate, she adds.
I tasted confectionery and biscuit samples coated in cocoa-free chocolate from most of the companies I spoke to for this article. The “chocolate” looked the part and, to my surprise, melted much like the real thing. Although they tasted pleasant, like chocolate confectionery, any trace of cocoa flavour was overwhelmed by the sweetness, caramel, biscuit or nuts, and they ended up tasting more or less the same. The exception was Win-Win, whose white, milk and dark “chocolate” buttons had a more complex, more convincing flavour.
Chocolate expert and Academy of Chocolate judge Jennifer Earle says most consumers won’t notice if the cocoa in their favourite confectionery bar is replaced with one of these pretenders. “They’re not bad at approximating the chocolate-flavoured coating on cheap sweets, but they still don’t capture the complexity of good-quality chocolate,” she says. “Mass-market confectionery has relied on heavy processing and added flavourings for years. The variety of flavours within cocoa has been largely engineered out.”
Earle believes that chocolate alternatives have their place in a world where demand outstrips supply, especially for those brands with a genuinely smaller environmental impact. The fear is that big chocolate companies will give up on cocoa-based chocolate altogether. “It would be infuriating to see that instead of paying cocoa farmers properly to continue to grow what they’ve dedicated their land to, chocolate companies abandon them to get a cheaper, non-cocoa alternative,” she says.
One deterrent to turning their backs on cocoa is the word itself: “chocolate” resonates deeply on a nostalgic, emotional, sensory and taste level. And while cocoa-free bars might look and melt like the real thing, legally they can’t be called chocolate. UK labelling rules reserve that word for products made with defined amounts of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, so anything built from other ingredients – however clever the science – has to find another name.
In Earle’s view, there is room for both real chocolate and cocoa-free alternatives. But for cocoa to survive, farmers need support to face the pressures of climate change and the many other problems besetting their industry. And that means that chocolate lovers must be prepared to pay more for the good stuff. “Real chocolate that’s made with beans that are economically, environmentally and socially well sourced already should cost at least £8 per 100g, and that does make it a pricey treat for most people,” Earle says. But if enough of that were passed on to farmers to invest in climate-change-resistant, more productive plants, cocoa’s future could be secure.
In other words, cocoa-free chocolate may help ease the strain as prices soar and global demand outstrips supply. Consumers may not notice something has changed in their favourite bar. But for true chocolate lovers, there’s no substitute for the rich, joyful complexity of quality chocolate made with cocoa. Perhaps the real Wonka magic will lie in keeping the real thing alive too, not just coming up with a replacement.
How do they taste?
Jennifer Earle blind-tasted four cocoa-free alternatives, and gives her verdict in order of preference.
Choruba milk ‘chocolate’
Looks and snaps like supermarket milk chocolate, but its aroma is pure carob. The texture mimics chocolate, though it’s slightly drier and sandy. Far sweeter than craft milk chocolate, the flavour is dominated by sugar and a muted carob-cereal note. Pleasant enough for those who like very sweet confectionery, but the sugary cereal-milk aftertaste doesn’t deliver a true chocolate experience.
Where to try: not yet available in the UK. Used in confectionery and baked goods in Italy, and soon to expand into Germany, France and Nordic countries.
Win-Win milk ‘chocolate’
Looks much like milk chocolate, though the snap is slightly weak and dull. The aroma is mostly sugar with a clear carob note. The flavour is sweet carob softened by milk, vanilla and, possibly, other grains that take the edge off the carob. The melt is impressively close to real chocolate, and it’s far better than a straight carob bar, but it still doesn’t taste like chocolate.
Where to try: used in British bakeries and restaurants (including Apricity in London). Will be available direct to the public next year.
Betta Choc filled ‘chocolate’
Looks like chocolate, though the sheen is a little dull. The aroma is mostly carob with a touch of vanilla that could, at a glance, pass for basic supermarket chocolate. Tastes firmly of carob with a texture close enough to be convincing – an impressive effort for something with no cocoa at all. Lacks the depth of real chocolate, though if you’d grown up with it, the sugar-fat hit might be enough.
Where to try: not yet available.
ChoViva filled milk ‘chocolate’
The texture does not approximate chocolate, as it’s sandy and melts too quickly. Incredibly sweet and tastes of rice and vanilla, with earthy notes. Tastes cheap and quite unpleasant. It’s really not anything like chocolate except in colour and the fact that both contain sugar and fat.
Where to try: in the UK, ChoViva is available in Aldi’s Dairyfine range and Candy Kittens’ vegan sweets.
Nukoko
Not sampled and not yet available.