Peanuts cause allergies. Coffee and chocolate are threatened by climate change. What if you could create the same experience with different ingredients?
I’m holding a small foil-wrapped sample of what looks and tastes like a chocolate-covered peanut butter cup. But the chocolate isn’t made from cacao beans, and the peanut butter isn’t made from peanuts.
[Photo: courtesy Voyage Foods]Voyage Foods, the Bay Area-based startup that created the candy, is working to replicate foods that have challenges. In the case of peanuts, the problem is allergies, and for foods like chocolate and coffee, it’s the threat of climate change. Founder Adam Maxwell, a former chef who also previously worked at Endless West, a startup that makes wines and spirits with a food-science twist, saw that the world of food tech was most focused on alternatives to meat and milk.
Adam Maxwell [Photo: courtesy Voyage Foods]“There are dozens of chicken nugget companies and plant-based milk companies,” he says. “And the thought was really, well, why are people not tackling these other massive issues in food systems?” Coffee, for example, isbecoming more challenging to grow as climate change makes the tropics hotter. Cacao seeds, which are used to make chocolate, also grow in a relatively narrow temperature range, and the plants are threatened by increasing drought. Cocoa production is also helpingcauseclimate change because forests are cleared to make way for cacao plantations.
Before they’re processed, cacao seeds don’t actually taste like chocolate. “If you have a cacao seed on a cocoa farm, it tastes much more like lychee than it does a chocolate bar,” Maxwell says. A product like chocolate or coffee “really only exists because of process, not the input feed material.” The company is focused on finding more resource-efficient ingredients that can end up creating a product that tastes similar to the original, with similar nutrition.
[Photo: courtesy Voyage Foods]Maxwell couldn’t share the details of the product development process, but it starts with an analysis of the molecules that make up a particular food so the team can search for the same characteristics in other ingredients. In the case of its peanut-free peanut butter, which the company will launch this spring, the ingredients include sunflower seeds and a blend of grains like rice, buckwheat, and quinoa. Its cacao-free chocolate relies in part on grape seeds. “One of the key flavors in chocolate is from phenolics, and that’s what gives a lot of bitterness, a lot of the astringency, and the backend mouthfeel. We use grape seeds, which have similar types of phenolics.”[Photo: courtesy Voyage Foods]The “peanut” butter I sampled did in fact taste like peanut butter, though the flavor seemed more subtle, and the color was paler. The coffee bean-free coffee tasted like cold brew coffee. The chocolate, on the other hand, didn’t quite taste like chocolate to me. Maxwell says that while they’re continually working on product development, he thinks the flavors are “surprisingly close, and to some people, extremely convincing.”
[Photo: courtesy Voyage Foods]He also argues that this type of future-proofing has to happen in food as climate change progresses. “In some ways, this is inevitable, right?” he says. “Either chocolate and coffee are going to be wildly expensive in 30 years, or someone’s going to make an alternative to them.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta
