| Who knew that mixing sunflower seeds with sugar and vegetable oils was another way to make chocolate? European startup Planet A Foods is doing just that to produce a cocoa-free alternative. It replicates the traditional process applied to cocoa beans — fermentation, drying and roasting — using locally grown ingredients. “There's an amazing process for cocoa,” said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Sara Marquart. “Eighty percent of the flavor in cocoa comes out of the processing and not from the cocoa bean itself. So why do you need a cocoa bean in the first place, right?” The company is among a number of startups working on chocolate made without cocoa, something venture capital investor Gil Horsky has dubbed “choco-tech.” More interest and funding is coming from investors and firms amid mounting concerns about cocoa’s supply chain — from climate change and crop disease hurting harvests to ethical issues such as child labor. And record cocoa prices are giving the quest even more urgency. After easing from an all-time high set earlier this year, cocoa futures have suddenly soared again, hitting a new peak of almost $13,000 a ton this week. Harvest prospects in top grower Ivory Coast are souring, threatening to deepen a global shortage. Going into next year, tree disease and robust chocolate demand could fuel worries about multiyear structural shortages, Bloomberg Intelligence says. Munich-based Planet A Foods says that using regional ingredients — instead of crops grown in tropical rainforests — also avoids the risk of contributing to deforestation. The company already supplies German supermarkets like Lidl as well as the country’s trains and Lufthansa planes with the cocoa-free chocolate, and has just raised $30 million in new funding to expand and scale up production. It plans to introduce products in the UK and France in the first quarter of next year and is in talks about partnerships in the US and Asia. Other startups looking to bypass using traditional beans include Voyage Foods, which has a distribution partnership with crop giant Cargill, and Endless Food Co., which makes chocolate from brewers’ waste products. There’s also Celleste Bio, which uses cells extracted from cocoa plants and grows them in bioreactors to produce cocoa butter and powder. It has secured funding from Toblerone maker Mondelez, which recently revived its interest in taking over US chocolate maker Hershey. Surging cocoa costs have forced chocolatiers into a raft of measures, including shrinking packages, promoting non-chocolate flavors in traditional candies and diversifying into things like gummy snacks. For Planet A Foods, it’s not just about avoiding high cocoa costs, but also the uncertainty of the kind of big price swings seen in the market in the past year or so. The company says its product is now cheaper than the cocoa-based equivalent. When the company started three years ago, its aim was for a price parity with chocolate,’ said Maximilian Marquart, the company’s CEO and Sara’s brother. “We kept our price steady while the cocoa prices have completely skyrocketed,” he said. We have a stable price.” —Agnieszka de Sousa in London | 
