Food industry behemoth Cargill and ethical pantry startup Voyage Foods are bringing their cocoa-free chocolate range, NextCoa, to North America.
Two years after forming a partnership to help decarbonise the cocoa industry with bean-free chocolate, Cargill and Voyage Foods are now introducing the fruits of their labour.
The two companies are bringing their plant-based, cocoa-free chocolate alternative, NextCoa, to North America. They’re starting with the US, where Cargill is working with Batory Foods, Blendtek and Gillco Ingredients to supply customers. An expansion into Canada is imminent.
It will be available in two styles: a milk-chocolate-like Mild format, and a Dark Mild variant that resembles a mix between dark and milk chocolate. They’ll be sold as bake-style drops, and tempering and non-tempering wafers.
The cocoa-free innovations can be used in a range of applications, from inclusion in bars, baked goods, and ice creams to coatings for snacks and confectionery products.
“The NextCoa line is about expanding choice, not replacing chocolate but redefining what’s possible,” said Kojo Amoo-Gottfried, VP and managing director of cocoa and chocolate at Cargill Food North America. “It unlocks a new way for manufacturers to create the flavours and indulgent experiences people love while building resilience into the food system.”
NextCoa meets allergen-free, sustainable chocolate demand
Founded in 2021 by Adam Maxwell, Voyage Foods sells a range of ethical pantry products, including cocoa- and nut-free peanut butter and chocolate-hazelnut spreads, made with ingredients like sunflower and grape seeds, chickpeas, and buckwheat, and available in over 1,400 locations nationwide. In addition, it also beanless coffee from roasted chickpeas and rice hulls.
By relying on cheaper and more stable raw materials and utilising agricultural byproducts, the company is aiming to lighten the planetary impact of foods like these ingredients as well as catering to allergies.
For its cocoa-free chocolates, Voyage Foods upcycles grape seeds from wine industry sidestreams, and combines them with subflower kernel flour, vegetable fats, sunflower lecithin, sugar, and natural flavours. It uses a combination of fermentation and roasting techniques to turn this base into a chocolate-like compound product.
The chocolate alternatives are free of the nine major allergens, a key focus for Cargill, which cites research showing that nearly 1 in 10 Americans (33 million) suffer from at least one food allergy.
The innovation plays into consumer demand for more sustainable chocolate. Polling by Cargill shows that 76% of people want to buy more sustainable chocolate or cocoa-based products, but are unsure how to do so, while other research reveals that 71% of global consumers find upcycled ingredients appealing.
“We built Voyage Foods to rethink how the world’s favourite foods are made,” said Maxwell, who is Voyage Foods’s CEO. “With Cargill, we can scale that vision, making our approach to chocolatey-like foods accessible to even more manufacturers.”
Aside from product development, Voyage Foods’s partnership with Cargill makes the latter its exclusive B2B distributor globally, leveraging its vast supply chain to bring cocoa-free chocolate to a broad set of clients.
Cargill bets on cocoa-free chocolate to drive sustainability
For Cargill, sustainability is the main play here. Analysis shows that its greenhouse gas emissions reached 53.46 million tonnes in 2023, placing it fifth among the meat and dairy industry’s biggest emitters.
The company’s 2025 impact report stated that it had reduced absolute operational emissions from Scopes 1 and 2 by 21% (from a 2017 baseline). That said, Scope 3 emissions (which account for GHG output across the entire value chain) make up the majority of its climate footprint, and Cargill has yet to transition to measuring reductions as a percentage on this metric.
Decarbonising its cocoa business emissions will help in a big way here. Chocolate emits more greenhouse gases than every other food except beef, and it can take as much as 1,700 litres of water to produce a bar of chocolate. The industry is linked to widespread tropical deforestation, and is the subject of anti-deforestation legislation in the EU and the UK.
And the climate damage it’s causing is coming back to bite the chocolate trade. Cocoa stocks plunged to their lowest levels in a decade, and prices rose to all-time highs in 2024. And scientists warn that a third of the world’s cocoa trees could die out by 2050.
According to a life-cycle analysis, compared to conventional chocolate, NextCoa can reduce the water footprint by 95%, land-use impact by 90%, and carbon footprint by 67%.
Aside from Voyage Foods, Cargill has also been working with Israeli startup Kokomodo on product applications with cell-cultured cocoa. And last year, it joined Bühler Group’s New Chocolate Challenge as an industry expert.
It’s one of several industry giants taking an interest in the alt-chocolate space. Puratos and Mondelēz International are both working on cell-based cocoa products with startups they’ve invested in, and Lindt, Dulciar, Walcom, Piasten and others have co-launched cocoa-free products with these disruptors.
Voyage Foods is among several firms specialising in cocoa-free chocolate, including Planet A Foods, Compound Foods, Prefer, Win-Win, Foreverland, Nukoko, and Endless Food Co.
