<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2hcs6P_0vULBLJJ00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2hcs6P_0vULBLJJ00" width="1400" height="788" >LEILA FADEL, HOST: The price of chocolate went up faster than inflation last year, jumping 10%. Climate change is driving more extreme weather events in the region where many cocoa beans are grown. That's reducing the global supply. This week, NPR is looking at how the climate affects what we eat and how what we eat affects the climate. NPR Central Europe correspondent Rob Schmitz has this story of a brother-sister team in Germany who are working on a solution - making chocolate without cocoa beans.ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Around two-thirds of the global supply of cocoa beans comes from two African countries - the Ivory Coast and Ghana. A few years ago, when food scientist Sara Marquart read about this, she was intrigued.SARA MARQUART: So A, you have a bit of a problem that it's a very small region that all the cocoa is coming from. And second, you have a plant with cocoa that is very susceptible to climate change.SCHMITZ: Just last year, both the Ivory Coast and Ghana received record rainfall prior to the autumn cocoa harvest. It left fungal tree infections and rotting cocoa fruit. The global supply dwindled. Big chocolate manufacturers stockpiled cocoa beans, and the price for raw cocoa went up by more than 350% in a single year. This shortfall has set the stage for companies like Marquart's Planet A Foods, whose scientists have been working on a chocolate substitute for three years. And making a food that looks like chocolate, feels like chocolate, tastes like chocolate but isn't chocolate takes time.ANNA-LENA KRUG: Between 700 and 800 times.SCHMITZ: That's how many recipes food scientist Anna-Lena Krug and her team at Planet A Foods had to tweak before arriving at what they call ChoViva, a chocolate alternative that discards the cocoa bean.KRUG: I don't know if you've ever had the chance to try a raw cocoa bean. But if you've ever tried it, you will realize that the aroma pretty much doesn't have anything to do with the conventional milk chocolate.SCHMITZ: Krug says that's because chocolate's aroma forms during the fermentation and roasting of the cocoa bean. So Krug and her colleagues tried fermenting and roasting more than 100 ingredients - apricot pits, olive kernels, jackfruit seeds and potato peels. They finally settled on a combination of oats and sunflower seeds.(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY RUNNING)SCHMITZ: After mixing these fermented and roasted oats and sunflower seeds with milk, shea butter and a few other ingredients, Krug pours the concoction into what's called a conche machine that heats it up, evenly distributing the ingredients, slowly releasing acids to arrive at the texture and flavor of chocolate.(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY RUNNING)SCHMITZ: Company co-founder Sara Marquart says after months of trial and error, in the summer of 2021, she and her team sent out their first version of ChoViva to taste testers.S MARQUART: And we got a lot of good feedback, actually. So that was, I would say, the first time in our journey, like, I would say, after five months of - after incorporation that we had positive feedback from customers, and they were like, wow. This actually tastes amazing.SCHMITZ: That same year, Marquart joined a Bay Area startup accelerator called Y Combinator, known for funding companies like Airbnb, Coinbase and DoorDash. With fresh funding and support, Marquart and her brother Max began signing contracts with big German retailers. Max Marquart, in charge of the business side of Planet A Foods, says his goal for ChoViva is not to replace chocolate but to replace it in applications where it's merely an ingredient in a larger product.MAX MARQUART: Where you have, like, M&amp;M, Snickers, you know, where you have a filling, where you combine it - it's that snacking, cereals, ice creams, you know, all that - chunks in cookies - that's the stuff that we do.SCHMITZ: And they do it for the same price as chocolate but with 90% less CO2 emissions, due to the fact that the ingredients that go into ChoViva - mainly oats and sunflower seeds - are not being shipped from an equatorial region in Africa or South America.S MARQUART: Whereas with oats, you can basically grow it everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere, where it's not too hot, not too humid.SCHMITZ: Marquart says drawing on locally sourced oats and seeds also means a savings of 94% less water than what's required to sustain cacao trees that produce cocoa beans. ChoViva's success has meant Marquart has a new product in the works that aims to reduce the impact of another ingredient also known for its impact on the environment - palm oil. She says she plans to commercialize a palm oil alternative sometime in the next year.Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Munich.(SOUNDBITE OF WILL HARRISON'S "RELUCTANT SOLDIER")FADEL: Our climate solution series continues tomorrow. Some cities are encouraging restaurants to switch from gas stoves to electric.Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.</div></body>

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Climate change prompted these scientists to reinvent chocolate

The price of chocolate went up faster than inflation last year, jumping 10%. Climate change is driving more extreme weather events in the region where many cocoa beans are grown. That's reducing the global supply. This week, NPR is looking at how the climate affects what we eat and how what we eat affects the climate. NPR Central Europe correspondent Rob Schmitz has this story of a brother-sister team in Germany who are working on a solution - making chocolate without cocoa beans.

Climate change prompted these scientists to reinvent chocolate

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