Support for NPR and the following message come from Boulin Branch. Experience your best sleep in the softest organic cotton sheets. Get 15% off and free shipping on your first set of sheets at www.BoulinBranch.com with code NPR. Exclusions Apply, seaside for details. This year's theme, food. For day three how we eat, I've got one of NPR's international correspondence, Rob Schmitz on deck. Hey Rob, welcome to the show. Gina, thanks for having me.
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. Actually, I need to correct you already, because this is a chocolate alternative. No cocoa beans were harmed in the making of this chocolate. I'm okay to be corrected. I'm still going to eat some of this not chocolate. Okay, good. Because I heard that there's lots of problems facing the chocolate industry right now, like climate change.
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. 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.
Yeah, and these two countries are subject to a lot of the increasingly extreme weather patterns as scientists expect to see in the region as climate change worsens, including record rainfall. 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. 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 a lead to a massive price increase in the global supply. Meanwhile, chocolate companies move to stockpile cocoa beans. And this also at the stage for like food scientists to start cooking up like a solution. 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. So today on the show reenvision 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 shortwave from NPR. This message comes from an PR sponsor, Mill.
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What is the future of food look like as the climate continues to change? We'll bring you innovations and answers during NPR's climate solutions week. Explore with us at mpr.org slash climate week. I'm Jesse Thorne. On Bullseye, Common tells us who inspired him. I was definitely looking up to Pete Rock and see us move.
And Pete Rock talks about the common albums that he loved. Yeah, one day it all makes sense. And the two of them will talk about how they teamed up for the first time in almost two decades. On Bullseye, for maximumfund.org and NPR. Okay, 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. Yeah, so I visited the headquarters for a company called Planet A Foods and it's run by a brother sister team from Munich, Sarah and Max Markort. Sarah is a food scientist and Max is a businessman.
And a few years ago, Sarah 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 a climate change. So they thought, hey, let's make a business that creates an alternative to chocolate and they're calling it Chaviva. Yeah, so tell me like the timeline to develop something like this.
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. I can. I was alive. So as I and Sarah has like many of us has a has a stand mixer at home and she started to just mix random food pieces of pits, seeds. I mean, she was trying. Wow. Jack fruit seeds. She was trying olive kernels, apricot pits. She was trying potato peels.
Just stuff that reminded her of like cocoa beans. Well, she's a food scientist. Yeah. And when she's thinking about this as a food scientist, she's thinking about substitute foods or wrong 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. Oh, right. No, that makes sense.
She's 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 starts to sort of match both the taste and aroma of what happens when a cocoa bean is fermented and roasted.
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? Exactly. And when I talked to Sarah, 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.
You have a lot of instruments and those have to play together. They have to make harmony. And the same is with coconut chocolate flavor. So it's not a single coconut chocolate flavor. It's often 20, 30, 40 different aromas. And so you have to be the myastro tuning those aroma compounds to have than the impression of cocoa flavor. So how many times did she have to do this to get like to get this recipe right hundreds? I mean, I don't think she counted, you know, one, two on a piece of paper.
But she told me that it was in her estimate eight 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 sort of settled on two main ingredients to substitute for chocolate. Okay. These two main ingredients are sunflower seeds and oats. I mean, it sounds, this sounds good. 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, it not only tastes in some ways like chocolate once is fermented and roasted, it also behaves like it. Wow. Okay. 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?
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, right. But one of them was using potato peels. That's, 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. Well, it makes me think of also just like, waste, right? Like if you, if you can use these things to kind of like make other products, you're kind of what do they call it upcycling things?
Yeah, that's right. And I think in, 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. Wow. I think I should try this. You've done this, right? Like you've, you've, I was actually in their, their, their headquarter kitchen and I tasted it straight off the assembly line.
That's like Willy Wonka stuff. It is. Yeah. No, it was like being a kid in a chocolate bakery. 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 one soon. All right. Okay. So I'm looking at this chocolate bar looks very milk chocolatey. I'm going to try it. What do you think? It's way better than I thought it was going to be me to I was shocked when I ate it because I was not expecting very much.
And it did taste like a legit piece of chocolate, the initial taste and like breathing in, you know, when Sarah saying like taste and smell like it's almost like the experiences chocolate. 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.
Yeah. Yeah. So like tell me what you learned about how this is like processed while you were there. 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 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 the conch machine. They have actually have a nickname for there is called conchita. So cute.
So they put this into conchita and the conch 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. I just looked it up. It's a branch of physics talking about basically deforming the material.
Yeah. I think what what the term rheology has applied to what they're doing to this chocolate mix is to try and mix these ingredients in an equitable way. So that it's it's when you taste even the corner of it, you're going to get the equal amount of every ingredient in that final product. Then 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 chaveva starts to fall out. And they they they do this a few times. And I actually was eating it straight off of that wheel from from their kitchen. Yeah. But like now that they have this like delicious product like what what now. Yeah. So once they figured out that they had something they started to look for money.
And they went to why combinator business accelerator based in the Bay area. The why combinator is pretty famous in the startup community globally because big companies like Airbnb coin base, door dash, they all sort of started with this particular accelerator only one percent of startups actually make it through this process and they made it.
Wow. 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, Rive and Erika. And they're already putting their product chaveva into a bunch of different types of products like peanut butter cups, cereal brands, you know, things like that. So I mean, are they seeing themselves as like a real competitor or like a replacement for chocolate?
They're not thinking about it as replacing chocolate. They want it to be an ingredient in bigger products and not the main food. So what's next for this company? You said that they've already started putting in peanut butter cups already started doing, you know, putting in cereals, but like what what more do they want to do? Yeah. So Sarah 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 Sarah thinks would work well for a darker chocolate alternative. I'm waiting for that. 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 hemisphere.
And so a product like theirs like Choviva could have lower CO2 emissions due to the fact that those ingredients are locally sourced. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And it's also less water intensive. Sarah says that drawing on locally sourced oats and sunflower seeds can also mean using less water than what's required to sustain the coucoutries. Wow. That's huge.
Yeah. Sarah 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.
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. Well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Shortwavers will 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 Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer is James Willetts.
Beth Sullivan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to shortwave from NPR. You think I should try these white chocolate ones to see if I hate them as much as white chocolate? Totally. Yeah, try them. They're good. Really? Yeah. I love NPR's podcasts. You wish they weren't interrupted by sponsor breaks like this one. And you want to support NPR's mission of creating a more informed public.
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