Loacker Teams Up with Endless Food Co to Support Bean-Free Chocolate Development

Danish food tech startup Endless Food Co has teamed up with Italian confectionery giant Loacker Group to advance its bean-free chocolate, after becoming a recipient of its corporate VC fund.

Loacker Group has signed a strategic partnership with Danish bean-free chocolate maker Endless Food Co, focusing on technical development, product innovation, and market growth.

The Italian legacy confectionery maker has chosen the startup as one of the two initial investees of its corporate VC programme, through which it’s collectively doling out €1M in annual funding.

Leveraging its financing arm, Loacker Investment Office, the initiative supports innovative startups with high growth potential that aim to transform the food system.

Endless Food Co upcycles food industry waste into THIC (This Isn’t Chocolate), a sustainable, climate-resilient alternative to chocolate. It won the annual commitment alongside Dr Taste, which develops predictive platforms that incorporate neuroscientific and sensory data to understand consumer responses.

Endless Food Co CEO Maximillian Bogenmann called it “an energising and validating moment” for the firm: “It’s an honour to align with a storied organisation with such deep technical, value-driven, and flavour-rooted experience in confectionery products. As we’ve said from the beginning, we want to build within and with the chocolate industry, and we’re confident we can do that together.”

Under the partnership, Endless Food Co will combine its raw material supply chain, Nordic customer relationships, and confectionery manufacturing experience with Loacker’s capital, century-long category expertise, and product innovation and technical development expertise. The two will work on technical development and the go-to-market strategy to fuel the former’s growth.

“Loacker Group didn’t get to a century in confectionery by chasing every new ingredient trend. They got there by understanding their space better than almost anyone,” Christian Bach, COO of Endless Food Co, said in a LinkedIn post.

“If anyone knows where indulgence is headed, it’s them. That they’re betting on us to help take it there is one of the most validating things that’s happened for us yet.”

Endless Food Co aligns with Loacker’s investment priorities

A chef-led brand, Endless Food Co was established in 2022 by Bach, Maximilian Bogenmann, and Matthew Orlando. The latter is touted as one of the world’s best chefs and worked at Michelin-starred eateries Noma, The Fat Duck, Aureole and Le Bernardin. He was the owner of Copenhagen’s eco-minded Amass Restaurant, where he worked alongside his now-co-founders.

The three built on the restaurant’s sustainability heritage by developing a solution to the chocolate industry’s climate issues while reducing food waste, which accounts for up to a tenth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

To make its ingredients, Endless Food Co uses industrial byproducts such as brewer’s spent grain (BSG), the solid residue from malted barley after beer production, cacao husks (usually discarded or used as fertiliser), and the pulp left over from oat milk production. These ingredients account for up to 40% of THIC, and are paired with wild-harvested shea butter and organic beet sugar.

The startup mimics traditional chocolate-making processes to turn this mix into a powder that can be embedded into a chocolate production line. This is then refined with a stone grinder and passed through a conch, which helps produce a chocolate-like mass that is then fed through a tempering and moulding line.

THIC is processed into blocks, chunks, granulates, and powders, enabling a wide range of applications, such as pains au chocolat, cakes, cookies, brownies, ice creams, mousses, sauces, and ganaches, without manufacturers having to change recipes or baking times.

The innovation fits into several of Loacker’s core areas for investment, with the confectioner focused on “pioneering natural ingredients, developing balanced nutrition without compromising on taste, driving circular economy solutions and enhancing supply chain transparency through smart data”.

“While cocoa remains a key ingredient for Loacker, we are interested in exploring innovative approaches that can contribute to a more resilient and sustainable food system,” said Andreas Loacker, VP of the Italian confectioner. “We see Endless Food Co’s technology as a promising area of innovation and are pleased to support the company with our expertise and strategic investment.”

Big Chocolate increasingly glazes alternatives

Endless Food Co is tackling an industry being pummelled by climate change. Cocoa stocks plunged to their lowest levels in a decade and prices rose to all-time highs in 2024. Extreme weather and crop diseases are hitting plantations hardest in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest producers, and scientists warn that a third of the world’s cocoa trees could die out by 2050.

Plus, producing chocolate emits more greenhouse gases than any other food except beef, and a single bar of chocolate requires an average of 1,700 litres of water. THIC has been found to reduce emissions by 85% compared to conventional dark chocolate.

Adding to its sustainability credentials is the waste valorisation. BSG makes up 85% of the waste produced by the brewing industry. Every year, 36.4 million tonnes of BSG are manufactured globally, but 80% of this is repurposed into animal feed or biofuel, and the rest ends up in landfill.

Cacao, meanwhile, is among the most wasted fruits in the world – around 70-80% of the fruit is thrown away during chocolate production, despite the discarded parts having high nutritional and functional value.

These value propositions have landed THIC in a range of products. Endless Food Co partnered with 7-Eleven Denmark to launch THIC-made cookies in all 180 of its stores nationwide, with German cereal producer Barnhouse to use the ingredient in a vegan granola, and with Danish food distributor Banana Cph to provide the standard ingredient in a chocolate sheet cake.

The company supplies bakeries of various sizes across Europe, has netted a major distribution deal in Denmark, and is working to establish a 3,800 sq ft manufacturing facility that would enable it to churn out 20 tonnes of its upcycled chocolate alternative each month. It raised €1M in pre-seed funding in 2024, and is now being backed by a confectionery company with a 101-year history.

It is among a host of alternative chocolate startups – including Planet A Foods, Voyage Foods, and Celleste Bio – that have secured major investments and partnerships from Big Chocolate companies like Nestlé, Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Puratos, Mondelēz International, Mars, Lindt, Döhler, and Cargill.