Compound Foods launches ingredients platform for sustainable cocoa alternatives

USA – Compound Foods, a startup known for its sustainable alternatives innovations, has launched its proprietary beanless coffee and cocoa ingredient platform to provide alternatives of cocoa, coffee and chocolate.

Built to derisk global supply chains, the new platform provides brands with functional, great-tasting alternatives to traditional coffee and cocoa without the bean.

Using upcycled agricultural sidestreams, fermentation, and formulation science, the company recreates these functional ingredients without compromising on flavour or function.

CEO Maricel Saenz told AgFunderNews that with prices going up and availability becoming more unpredictable, many formulators are looking to reduce the amounts of these ingredients they use in a given formulation and make up the difference with alternatives.

“B2b was always in our plan, because large-scale transformation is always going to be at the b2b level. From the beginning, though, we felt it was important to have a consumer brand [Minus], because we wanted to get feedback from consumers, so that when we’re talking to larger partners, we can not only demonstrate that we can produce high quality products at scale, but that consumers accept them,” she said.

Formulation

The company has reverse-engineered coffee, cocoa, and chocolate, creating an ingredient database designed to replicate these foods at the molecular level. Additionally, it has developed expertise in fermentation to produce more complex flavours, though this process incurs higher costs.

The company said, “We’ve developed a database of strains and many different processes that help us get the complexity that you find in high quality coffee, for example. But we can also process our ingredients without using fermentation if we want to go for more cost-effective alternatives.”

The company stated that it has also validated a broad range of ingredients that can work in its formulations, such that if the supply of an ingredient it currently uses is threatened, it can switch it out with something else without huge difficulty.

The coffee alternatives are made with date seeds, chicory, sunflower seeds, carob, and grape seeds; while the cocoa alternatives are made with carob, mesquite, spent grain, sunflower lecithin, and cascara.

As for manufacturing, the CEO said that while there is IP in the formulations and processes, the equipment required to produce the beanless ingredients is not proprietary, and they can be produced by co-packers.

“It has been our strategy from the beginning to use co-manufacturers to scale and we’ve designed our products and our processes to fit within existing food manufacturing capabilities,” she said.

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