Upcycled Easter uses everything cocoa offers!

According to ABICAB, Brazilian chocolate consumption per capita is 3 kg/person/year. It’s not much, in Switzerland each inhabitant consumes three times that amount, but it’s enough for us to be the 5th largest consumer country in the world.

We love talking about Easter and chocolate since 2015, when we started (see here, here and more here), but we need to talk about a bitter side of this industry: to make chocolate, everything is discarded, only the cocoa bean is used. The peel represents 80% of the weight of the fruit, while the honey and the pulp, 10%. What the industry uses is the remaining 10%.

According to the Upcycled Food Association, if all the cocoa harvested were used to the fullest, it would reduce the same amount of CO2 as planting 3.5 billion trees a year. An area larger than France and Germany combined.

Finally, there is the farmers income. In traditional production, they are paid only for harvesting the seeds. Upcycling provides additional income, as it promotes the sale of parts that were previously discarded.

Let’s move to the solutions for upcycled Easter!

The German start-up Spoontainable produces edible spoons with cocoa and oat seed husks to replace disposable ones. Spoons are stable for up to an hour, ideal for post-dessert consumption.

What to do with cocoa pulp? Cabosse Naturals and Koa transform it in ingredients for the industry and other companies use it to produce beverages for all tastes. There is also cocoa honey, well known in the country.

Dengo uses cocoa bean shells in its Easter egg packaging.

Those who are investing in this are two Brazilian companies. Baiani uses cocoa butter residue from the production of its own chocolates to make moisturizer.

In artisanal production, after the butter is extracted, the result is not a white and pure product like the industrial one, so you have to let it decant. The clear mass goes into the chocolate while the dark part now decanted serves to hydrate the skin.

Cacaus Biocosméticos is the result of the PhD research of its founder, who studied microorganisms that cause diseases in cocoa. He was astonished by the amount of pods thrown away and decided to further study the raw material. He discovered an immense amount of bioactive compounds and, from there, finished his initial thesis and started a new project for the use of waste.

Cosmetics with cocoa waste have already passed the testing phase and patents have already been requested.

We hope that with all these inspirations, your company is ready for an upcycled Easter this year and in the coming years!