Chocolate substitutes
Chocolate is a very popular delicacy but one that is likely to become rare in the future. Indeed, the price of cocoa has risen dramatically in recent years. The reasons are related to climatic hazards and highly contagious cocoa tree diseases, transmitted by mealybugs.
Food manufacturers, in order to continue to offer “typical” chocolate products to their consumers, are finding solutions.
The first way to do this is to offer products that are less rich in cocoa, and in particular cocoa butter, by replacing, as the law allows, up to 5% of cocoa butter with other exotic vegetable fats (palm, shea, etc.). This works well on milk chocolates.
You can also make “Compound” which is a confectionery that looks like chocolate but where all the cocoa butter is replaced by other vegetable fats. It is mainly used in decoration for what are called couverture chocolates.
Other parts of the cocoa fruit that have been neglected until now can also be used, such as pulp or pod reduced to powder.
But, in a more innovative way, small companies are proposing to make chocolate substitutes from other plant sources.
Carob flour
Cocoa powder
The most commonly used is carob seed. We can mention several companies that offer carob-based confectionery, which looks like milk chocolate. This is the case of “Foreverland”, an Italian company, or “The Carob Kitchen”, an Australian company.
Carob, in powdered form, was already used in some pastries to replace cocoa powder. Its color(,) and sweet taste were already an illusion.
But other companies go further by using legume beans (beans, beans) to make and market chocolate substitutes. This is the case of the Nukoko company in the United Kingdom.
The company Alfalfa offers a partial or total substitute based on malted flour. On a different note, Choviva (U.K) offers a substitute based on fermented and roasted sunflower seeds and oats to replace chocolate.
As we can see, these solutions, already incorporated into confectionery, or marketed already partially meet the need to find alternatives to chocolate.
Beans
Malted barley
Sunflower seeds
Malt flour
