IN Brief:
- European ingredient developers are widening cocoa-alternative work as price volatility continues to pressure confectionery manufacturers.
- The 18-month programme will use solid-state malt fermentation to create cocoa-like flavour profiles from sprouted grains.
- Scale-up work will run through a four-ton demonstrator in France, with potential applications across chocolate-style, bakery, and sweet products.
Soufflet Malt and Ferments du Futur have launched an 18-month development programme to produce cocoa alternatives from fermented sprouted grains.
The project will use solid-state malt fermentation to reproduce cocoa-like sensory characteristics from cereal-based substrates. Barley malt, wheat, and other germinated grains will be assessed as potential feedstocks, with development work focused on aroma formation, roasted flavour notes, colour, and functional performance in food applications.
By combining malting expertise with fermentation science, the partners are targeting ingredients that can support confectionery, bakery, and sweet goods manufacturers exposed to cocoa cost and supply pressure. The work brings Soufflet Malt’s grain-processing capabilities together with Ferments du Futur’s fermentation research platform, creating a route from substrate selection through to pre-industrial testing.
The programme will use a four-ton demonstrator in Nogent-sur-Seine, France. That scale-up element gives the project a more practical manufacturing dimension, because alternative cocoa ingredients have to move beyond promising sensory tests and into repeatable production, stable specifications, and formats that can be integrated into existing factories.
Laurent Debande, business development director at Soufflet Malt, said: “By combining our know-how in malting with fermentation, we’re opening new pathways for sustainable ingredients with high organoleptic value.”
Cocoa alternatives are moving into a more industrial phase as processors look for ways to manage exposure to high cocoa prices, weather disruption, crop disease, and concentrated supply chains. Full replacement is not the only route being explored. Partial substitution, flavour extension, cocoa powder reduction, and chocolate-style components for bakery and snacks are all gaining attention as manufacturers work to protect product quality while reducing raw-material risk.
The launch follows a wider run of alternative-cocoa activity, including Fermtech’s work to scale Koji Cocoa from cocoa side streams and Mars’ Balisto trial using Planet A Foods’ cocoa-free ChoViva ingredient. Those developments show how quickly the category is fragmenting, with fermentation, crop-side-stream valorisation, sunflower-based alternatives, and cultured cocoa ingredients all moving through different parts of the development pipeline.
For grain-based fermentation, the technical task extends beyond creating a convincing cocoa note. Manufacturers will need the ingredient to behave predictably under heat, shear, moisture, and storage. Chocolate-style fillings, biscuits, cereals, coatings, compound products, and bakery inclusions all place different demands on flavour release, colour, fat compatibility, viscosity, and shelf-life stability.
Solid-state fermentation gives developers a route to work with low-moisture substrates and flavour-active transformations that differ from conventional liquid fermentation. In malt and cereal systems, that can support complex roasted and Maillard-style character, while also allowing ingredient developers to tune process conditions around sprouting, microbial activity, drying, and downstream treatment.
The first commercial opportunities are likely to sit in products where cocoa character is important but where full chocolate identity is not legally or sensorially essential. Bakery fillings, cereal coatings, sweet spreads, compound confectionery, and snack inclusions offer more room for ingredient blending than premium chocolate tablets, where consumer expectations and regulatory definitions are tighter.
For manufacturers, the attraction is not a single substitute but a broader resilience toolkit. Cocoa will remain central to chocolate and confectionery, but pressure on supply and price is forcing companies to widen the ingredient base around it. If Soufflet Malt and Ferments du Futur can show consistent flavour formation at demonstrator scale, fermented sprouted grains could become one of the more practical routes into cocoa reduction, particularly for applications where processability and cost matter as much as sensory precision.
