Turning sunflower seeds into sustainable, cocoa-free chocolate has netted Munich-based B2B food tech startup Planet A Foods (formerly QOA) a $30 million Series B funding round. Now, the Y Combinator alum is gearing up for industrialization, with the funds set to be deployed to scale its production capacity by around 7.5x. The round fast follows a $15.4 million Series A back in February.
Currently, the startup is producing 2,000 tons of ChoViva, as it calls its cocoa-free, lower carbon chocolate alternative, per year. It plans to step that up to over 15,000 tons as it adds capacity and kicks off international expansion outside an initial trio of European markets.
Opening its first U.S.-based production facility is on the cards. Building on the three local markets (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) where its chocolate substitute is already in food products that aim to tempt sweet-toothed consumers, it is also eyeing launches into the U.K. and France during the first quarter of 2025. Brands buying into ChoViva so far include Lambertz, Lindt, Rewe Group, and even the German train operator, Deutsche Bahn, which doubtless pops a lot of chocolate treats on customers’ tea trays every day.
So far, the startup has around 20 customers for its alt chocolate ingredients, mostly major European food manufacturers but also some U.S. brands. As it grows capacity, it’ll be aiming to add more strategic partners too.
Cocoa, not so sweet
The problem Planet A Foods is tackling is making a staple sweet treat (chocolate) less of an environmental horror. Traditional cocoa-based chocolate production raises serious sustainability issues, since the crop grows in areas with rainforest, which can be cut down to make way for cocoa bean plantations. Global demand is also outstripping an increasingly fragile (and ethically fraught) supply, leading to inflated costs and fears for the future of the cocoa bean in a rapidly warming world.
Supplying the food industry with an alternative chocolate-esque ingredient that — just like the real deal — can be baked into or folded onto snack products like breakfast cereals, confectionary, and cakes is Planet A’s mission. And it’s not a trivial goal: The startup reckons an annual toll of some 500 million tons of CO2 could be avoided through switching bulk chocolate production away from cocoa beans to its more sustainable method that avoids deforestation and localizes ingredients sourcing.
The ingredients it uses to produce ChoViva have been selected in part as they can be grown locally (oats are another of its staples) — hence it claims a carbon footprint that’s up to 80% lower than conventional chocolate (but note that higher bound is for the vegan version of ChoViva which, unlike other blends, doesn’t contain any milk products).
“We’re not against chocolate,” stresses co-founder and CEO Dr. Maximilian Marquart, one half of the brother-sister founder team behind Planet A Foods. CTO Dr. Sara Marquart is the food scientist who developed the process for making the cocoa-free chocolate. “That’s very important. So we’re not taking away your [premium] chocolate. We’re after all the snacking applications — [confectionary such as] M&Ms, Snickers, Mars, Bounty, you know, all that stuff.”
Premium chocolate is a tiny market compared to the bulk business of mass market confectionary that Planet A Foods is targeting. And in this domain, where environmental degradation occurs at terrible scale, the quality of the chocolate that’s used is generally lower, often because it’s lower in actual cocoa-content — hence [Maximilian] Marquart argues there’s no difference between how ChoViva tastes, and the stuff consumers are routinely being sold in mass market products. “It’s indistinguishable,” he suggests.
“My sister Sara . . . found out that actually 80% of the typical chocolate flavors come from the processing of the cocoa beans and not from the beans itself — so . . . if eight out of 10 flavors are actually coming from fermentation roasting, why do you need cocoa beans?”
Scaling for impact
The economics also make ChoViva an attractive switch for the industrial food industry, as the startup tells it, since the product is not subject to the price volatility that can hit cocoa beans as a limited resource. But for such a switch to happen, the startup needs to be able to produce its alternative at the volumes that food giants demand — so there’s a long road of scaling ahead for the team.
At this point, the production capacity for ChoViva still represents an incredibly tiny portion of the global cocoa bean harvest — which [Maximilian] Marquart notes is between 4 million and 5 million tons annually. So it will require giant leaps in production capacity to have the massive positive sustainability change the Marquarts want.
“We’ve already acquired the machines [for this stage of industrialization]. So we are already in the scale-up runs, and we have some real industrial clients already, so we’re currently just trying to cope with the demand in Europe,” he says, adding: “We’re automating. We’re improving the processes. We are also commissioning new machines. Plus, we are currently planning another facility in the States.”
They are also exploring how the business might respond to demand from Asia ([Maximilian] Marquart happens to be on a business trip to Japan when we talk). But he says they also recognize that, as a startup, they do need to focus, too.
“We’re a startup . . . we’re not naive. So we can’t conquer the world alone,” he tells TechCrunch. “I think U.K. and U.S. are the main markets where we will expand. However, in Asia we have a lot of demand, so we’re currently investigating what we do here — what we can do alone, and together with partners eventually.”
Supply chain all-nighters
Being in the (quasi) chocolate-making business might conjure up quaint images of high-hatted chocolatiers gently whipping batches of sweet stuff in charmingly rustic environs. But don’t be fooled: the business of manufacturing ChoViva is already sweating toil.
Having everything in place to be able to precisely produce tons of cocoa-free chocolate to ship out exactly when customers need it has required the founders to pull some all-nighters at the plant. And [Maximilian] Marquart says a big focus for this tranche of scaling is automation — so they can reduce the risk of human errors causing supply chain headaches.
We slept under those machines . . . Every day our life is a hell given the challenges that we have in the supply chain.”
“I think currently we’re at a scale — industrial scale — that no one else is,” he suggests when asked about the competitive landscape for cocoa-free chocolate. Other startups he name-checks are Foreverland, Nukoko, WinWin, and Voyage Foods. They are using various methods and base ingredients (including cereals, broad beans, carob, grape seeds, and more) to blend up rival cocoa-free chocolate products. So there’s a range of approaches in play.
In this context, and, indeed, for almost any kind of startup, succeeding “takes more than just developing a product” — or, in this case, an ingredient in a lab — and [Maximilian] Marquart says this invention element represents only 5% of the challenge they’ve set themselves.
“The main challenge lies in building up production, building up quality management, building up the supply chain. Every day, two 40-ton lorries leave our factory with our product. And that’s something that someone else needs to figure out. It’s really a challenge,” he emphasizes, adding: “Sara — my sister — and I, we slept under those machines. We really figured out the supply chain. It’s a big hassle. Every day our life is a hell given the challenges that we have in the supply chain.”
“Most of the other competitors, they have great products, but they need to bring that into reality, and need to be really able to deliver it to their customers, and that lies ahead of them. It’s incredibly difficult to deliver 40 tons of chocolate to a customer in time, at the right place, at the right recipe, the right quality.”
Planet A Foods’ Series B was co-led by Burda Principal Investments and Zintinus, with participation from AgriFoodTech Venture Alliance, Bayern Kapital, Cherry Ventures, Omnes Capital, Tengelmann Ventures, and World Fund.
R&D
Scaling aside, funding will also go on further research and development, as the team is working on an alternative to cocoa butter, which is another key ingredient for the food industry. Being able to offer a replacement for palm oil is another goal, as that also creates huge sustainability problems. The startup also believes its approach could work to replace other specialty fats that are used in food production, such as stearin, an animal fat, or coconut oil, per [Maximilian] Marquart.
“[Sara] developed a kind of full fermentation platform where we can make bio identical coco butter,” he notes, saying bio identical in this context “means the right mouthful, the right snap, the right melting point, the right properties.”
“With our fermentation technology, we can offer a bio identical cocoa butter using fermentation at a much lower price than conventional cocoa butter, and that’s really a game changer in the future,” he suggests. “I think we’re the only company that is actually able to produce cocoa butter using fermentation at a lower price than natural cocoa butter.”
There’s an additional challenge here, though. For one version of the cocoa butter, which [Maximilian] Marquart suggests yields the best set of properties, they use precision fermentation. It’s a biotech method that involves genetically engineered microorganisms. This version of the product has to be approved as a novel food before it can be sold. And since European regulations are more stringent, he suggests it could hit the U.S. market first.