Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Cocoa and Cocoa-free Chocolate Products
Voyage Foods is a food technology enterprise that aims to create sustainable versions of popular foods and drinks with environmental, social, or health challenges. Aiming to evaluate the environmental performance of their novel food products and position them as leading alternatives to traditional foods in the global market, Voyage Foods is introducing life cycle assessment (LCA) to key products.
Voyage Foods has commissioned Sphera to carry out the present prospective LCA study with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the potential cradle-to-gate environmental impacts of the future commercial production of Voyage Foods’ cocoa-free chocolate products, identify their environmental hotspots and compare them with conventional cocoa-based chocolate products.
The general objective of this prospective LCA study is to compare the potential cradle-to-gate environmental impacts of Voyage Foods’ cocoa-free “milk” and semisweet chocolate products with those of conventional milk (cacao content 25%) and semisweet (cacao content 65%) cocoa-based chocolate and identify the environmental hotspots from the product comparison. Although one of the Voyage products is labeled as cocoa-free milk chocolate, it does not contain any milk in its recipe. The production of one (1) kilogram of chocolate product has been chosen as the declared unit. The LCA study was executed by Sphera using its LCA software “LCA for Experts” (LCA FE, formerly known as GaBi)and its Managed LCA Content (formerly known as GaBi databases).
The findings of this study can provide insights to Voyage Foods employees about the environmental impacts and life cycle inventory data of the production of cocoa-free chocolate products. As the report contains comparative assertions that will be communicated to the public, it has undergone the process of critical review by a panel of experts. Customers, LCA practitioners, financial stakeholders (e.g., investors), the general public, and the media are the target audience for a potential later publication of this study.
Area of focus: Cocoa
Author(s): Rifat Karim, Diana Pacheco
Organisation/institution: Voyage Foods