Nocoa cocoa-free chocolate based on sunflower seeds and oats
22 Jun 2023 | Planet A Foods
In a bid to relieve the environmental stress caused by cocoa production, brother and sister duo Sara and Max Marquart teamed up to create the “world’s first cocoa-free chocolate.” The ingredient is based on sunflower seed and oats transformed during a fermentation and roasting process to yield a product that tastes and smells like cocoa. The co-founders looked for based products that could be sustainably produced in Europe.
This is Missy Green with CNS Media.
I'm here with Sarah and Max.
They're the brother and sister duo and co-founders of Nocoa, which is the world's first cocoa-free chocolate.
So why would brands want to replace chocolate?
If you look at the cocoa supply chain, you can see that 66% of worldwide cocoa is coming out of two countries, Ghana and Ivory Coast in West Africa.
In those countries, it's it's actually produced up to 3 million tons of cocoa per year.
And the ecosystem is quite under stress there because you have to produce so much cocoa and with increasing climate change, the harvestable areas for cocoa will diminish in the future that will lead to a shortage of cocoa, and that's why Nocoa is the right product to balance the shortage of cocoa and create a second pillar next to the cocoa supply chain.
And that's why companies are very interested in partnering with us.
And what is the ingredient exactly?
So we are using oats and sunflower seeds.
We carefully ferment them, similar to what is known from cocoa, and then we roast them, and both fermentation and roasting lead to the flavor formation that is tasting and smelling like cocoa.
How did you choose those ingredients?
So we looked into a lot of ingredients up front and we looked at what can be produced locally and what can be produced sustainably and also what is having the closest attributes to cocoa after our process and we came up with a lot of ingredients, but the most promising ones were oat and sunflower seeds.
One of your colleagues mentioned that you use an air fermentation process.
Could you explain a little bit more about that?
Yes, so we are using traditional fermentation which is known from beer brewing as.
Oh, OK, just traditional fermentation.
We pretty much re-engineered the cocoa process chain, so we looked at the cocoa process chain in the beginning and looked at raw cocoa beans fermented and roasted cocoa beans, and Sarah re-engineered the process to mimic the flavors that are being created in the cocoa.
OK, cocoa beans are also fermented, right?
You have this lactic acid fermentation, acetic acid fermentation, and also anaerobic fermentation, which is known from yeast fermentation, and these three fermentation steps play an essential role for the flavor formation.
So how can this type of product be listed or labeled?
On the market today, you always have like front of pack and back of pack, right?
Front of pack is a product name which in our case would be Nocoa, and back of pack is the standard of identity, basically the legal name of the product, and it can be called chocolate alternative or oat-based chocolate alternative because oat is the most characteristic and most the highest percentage in our product.
Is that within Europe?
Are you speaking within Europe?
Also in the US actually we have a certain of identity already checked for the US as and there's also chocolate alternative.
OK.
And are there products today on the market using this ingredient?
We are just about to launch the products.
We have a first partner in Germany where we launched some products with this person, but they are only available in Austria, in Switzerland, and in Germany.
And soon we will launch a national retail in Germany and then migrate to the US later 2024.
