Danish startup Endless Food Co has signed a distribution partnership with Dagrofa Foodservice, opening a “major new lane” for its bean-free chocolate.
In a nod to its chef-founded roots, Denmark’s Endless Food Co has notched a nationwide distribution deal for its climate-smart chocolate alternative.
The startup has entered a strategic partnership with Dagrofa Foodservice, one of the country’s leading distributors for the foodservice sector, to get its ingredient into “as many professional kitchens across Denmark as possible”.
The bean-free innovation, dubbed THIC (This Isn’t Chocolate), is made from upcycled ingredients, turning food industry waste into a sustainable alternative to a commodity hit hard by the climate crisis.
Dagrofa Foodservice called it a “wildly innovative” product that it has been following for several years. “Now we believe the time is right to help them and their successful product reach even more professional kitchens,” said Sabina Kronborg, the distributor’s category group manager.
“It is a clear strategic priority for us that we take responsibility for developing the Danish food scene by making partnerships with new innovative suppliers,” she added.
Upcycled ingredients processed the same way as chocolate
Endless Food Co was co-founded in 2022 by Matthew Orlando, touted as one of the world’s best chefs, who was the owner of Copenhagen’s eco-minded Amass Restaurant and has worked at Michelin-starred eateries The Fat Duck, Aureole and Le Bernardin.
At Amass, Orlando worked alongside COO Christian Bach (who previously worked at Noma) and CEO Maximilian Bogenmann. 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 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The startup uses industry byproducts like 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 leftover from oat milk production.
These upcycled ingredients account for up to 40% of THIC, and are paired with wild-harvested shea butter and organic beet sugar. Endless Food Co 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 help replicate a chocolate-like mass that speeds through a tempering and moulding line.
Endless Food Co produces THIC in formats such as blocks, chunks, granulates, and powders, enabling the product’s use in everything from pains au chocolat, cakes, cookies, and brownies to ice creams, mousses, sauces, and ganaches, without the need to change recipes or baking times.
“It is a product that is very practical, and it also speaks to the sustainability agenda that many canteens, restaurants and hotels subscribe to. And THIC tastes great – and that’s the most important thing,” said Marlene Lindegaard, Dagrofa Foodservice’s gastronomic development manager.
Endless Food Co tackles food waste and chocolate’s climate costs
By using BSG, it is valorising an ingredient that 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. Chocolate production itself is highly polluting, thanks in large part to the widespread use of deforestation-linked palm oil.
THIC is positioned as a one-to-one replacement for chocolate, and a life-cycle assessment shows it has an 84% lower climate footprint than conventional dark chocolate.
It also offers producers a climate-resilient solution to chocolate, whose stocks fell to their lowest levels in a decade and prices rose to all-time highs in 2024. Extreme weather and crop diseases have hit plantations hardest in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the two largest cocoa producers. And scientists warn that a third of the world’s cocoa trees could die out by 2050.
Endless Food Co has partnered with 7-Eleven Denmark to launch THIC-made cookies in all 180 of its stores nationwide, as well as with German cereal producer Barnhouse to use the ingredient in a vegan granola.
The company supplies bakeries of various sizes across Europe 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.
“Partnering with Dagrofa opens a major new lane for us into foodservice and makes it far easier for kitchens across Denmark to start working with THIC. At the same time, we’re continuing to build toward the bigger future we believe this category can have,” Endless Food Co said in a LinkedIn post.
A host of startups are working on bean-free chocolate alternatives – some with the backing of confectionery giants – including Voyage Foods, Planet A Foods, Compound Foods, Prefer, Win-Win, Foreverland, and Nukoko.
