Chocolate’s Soul Swap: Inside the Cocoa-Free Trend No One Asked For

An illustration of a cacao farmer in South America.

Let’s get one thing straight: chocolate without cocoa is not chocolate. It’s cosplay. It’s the Beyond Meat of desserts. It’s what happens when Silicon Valley bros stare too long at a cacao pod and think, “I could replace that with oat protein and a pitch deck.”

Now, why is this even a thing?

Because cocoa prices have gone absolutely feral. We’re talking nearly $13,000 a ton late last year—up from around $2,500 to $3,000 just a few years ago. And why? Sure, there’s drought, disease, and actual farmers getting steamrolled by climate change. But the real cherry on top? Futures trading. That fun little casino game where hedge fund guys with zero interest in chocolate bet on how expensive it might be in six months—while the rest of us watch the price of couverture climb like it's strapped to a SpaceX rocket.

Imagine a bunch of dudes in Patagonia vests manipulating a commodity most of them couldn’t identify in the wild, treating it like Monopoly money while makers and growers eat the fallout. These aren’t people who care whether the beans were fermented right. These are people who see cocoa and think, “Oh good, another vehicle for profit extraction.”

So now Big Chocolate’s looking for an out.

Enter the “cocoa-free” movement. Some are blending barley, carob, and grape skins like it’s a Chopped episode gone off the rails. Others are fermenting cocoa cells in bioreactors—because what’s more appetizing than lab-grown nostalgia?

Let’s be fair. Not all of this is snake oil. Some of it’s well-meaning. And we get the appeal: cheaper, stabler, allegedly sustainable. Plus, it gives food scientists something to do between inventing new Dorito flavors.

But here’s our problem: no one’s asking whether it’s good. They’re asking whether it’s scalable. Tolerable. Marketable. Chocolate, suddenly, is not a food—it’s a business case. A commodity. A lifestyle brand with a low environmental impact and the flavor profile of wet cardboard.

We’re not here for that.

At Cacao Chemistry, we still believe chocolate should taste like chocolate—because it actually is. We’re not here for cocoa-flavored adjacent bars that feel like they were designed by AI and focus-grouped by people who miss the taste of soy milk.

Our house chocolate? It comes from Valrhona, a French maker that’s been in the game for nearly a century and didn’t need a TED Talk to discover ethical sourcing. Their beans are traceable. Their growers are real people, not just statistics in a sustainability slide deck. They’ve got a B-Corp badge, but more importantly, they’ve got flavor.

We also carry bars from Republica del Cacao, a company actually based in Latin America that works directly with local farmers, sourcing ingredients like Andean milk and tropical fruits from within the region. You want sustainable? Try a company that doesn’t fly its beans halfway across the world before roasting. The result? Real chocolate that honors origin and terroir without the greenwashing.

So no, we’re not swapping out cocoa for “chocolate-like substance #472.”

We’re not anti-innovation—we’re just pro-craft. We’ll wait for tech to get interesting after it learns how to temper chocolate correctly.

And while others race to the bottom of the cocoa barrel—or the top of a VC funding ladder—we’ll be over here, doing what we’ve always done: making real chocolate, with real ingredients, for people who still believe dessert should taste like something you crave, not something you tolerate.

Because if chocolate’s going to survive, it shouldn’t have to give up its soul to do it.