Nestlé, the company behind household names like KitKat and Aero, has been quietly rewriting one of chocolate’s oldest rules, you don’t need to add refined sugar if you use more of the cocoa fruit itself. In 2019, the Swiss food giant unveiled a patented technique that sweetens chocolate with the creamy, naturally sugary pulp that surrounds the beans inside a cocoa pod. Instead of tossing that pulp aside after fermentation, Nestlé figured out how to dry and mill it into a fine ingredient that can replace conventional sugar while preserving the snap and melt that chocolate lovers expect. The first commercial proof point arrived in Japan with a limited KitKat Chocolatory bar made with 70% dark chocolate, in which the only ingredients from the sweetening side were the cocoa beans and their own pulp, no refined sugar needed.
Two years later, Nestlé widened the experiment beyond a single market. Under its Les Recettes de L’Atelier brand, the company launched Incoa, a 70% dark bar made exclusively with the cocoa fruit, again, using pulp’s intrinsic sweetness instead of cane sugar. That 2021 rollout moved the concept from a boutique novelty into mainstream European retail, signaling that the company could make the process work at a larger scale and at price points ordinary shoppers might accept. Independent industry coverage at the time emphasized the same core idea that the cocoa fruit contains not just beans but a soft, white pulp with natural sugars, and harnessing it could change how the supply chain values every part of the pod.
So why does this matter? For one, it offers a cleaner ingredient line with dark chocolate sweetened with something the cocoa pod already provides, rather than adding refined sugar later. That’s attractive for brands chasing shorter labels and for eaters looking to moderate refined sugar without pivoting to non-nutritive sweeteners. But it also opens a fresh sustainability angle. Traditional chocolate production uses a sliver of the cocoa fruit’s biomass, while much of the rest is waste. A growing body of research, separate from Nestlé but pushing in the same direction, argues that whole-fruit chocolate could reduce waste, diversify farmer income, and cut land and water footprints if the drying steps are managed efficiently at scale. Early lab studies have highlighted trade-offs, particularly in energy use during drying, but they also reveal pathways, such as solar drying, that can help reduce emissions as methods scale.
Nestlé pitches its technique as a natural evolution of that idea, with a pragmatic, commercial twist. Because the pulp’s sugars don’t behave exactly like crystalline table sugar, the company started where the fit was best, robust dark formulations, around 70% cocoa, in which sweetness plays a supporting role to cocoa character. That’s smart product strategy in a world where cocoa prices have soared and consumers are, paradoxically, more open than ever to darker, less sweet profiles. The company has framed the pulp-based approach as a way to deliver a pure, novel chocolate experience, not a diet product, one that tastes like chocolate because it is still, fundamentally, the cocoa fruit.
There are upstream benefits, too. If pulp becomes a valued input rather than a by-product, farmers could capture new revenue streams. That dovetails with Nestlé’s broader cocoa sourcing reforms, including its income accelerator program, which ties bonuses to schooling, agroforestry, and good agricultural practices, and a new agroforestry partnership with Olam Food Ingredients designed to reduce deforestation and pull carbon from the atmosphere over the coming decades. While those initiatives aren’t the pulp technique itself, they shape the ecosystem into which any whole-fruit approach would land, a supply chain that tracks origin, rewards on-farm investments, and, crucially, builds infrastructure near the farmgate to process pulp hygienically and efficiently.
Of course, a technique is not a market until it jumps categories and geographies. That’s the next test. Could pulp-sweetened approaches migrate into baking chips, filled bars, or even aerated chocolates like Aero, where structure and mouthfeel are more delicate? Can the pulp supply be standardized across harvests and origins? And will shoppers accept the small but noticeable shift in flavor, often described as a touch fruitier, when the “sugar” component comes from the cocoa fruit itself? These are execution questions, not science stoppers, and they are precisely the sort of hurdles that big confectioners are built to clear with pilot plants, sensory panels, and scale know-how.
For now, Nestlé’s cocoa-pulp technique stands as a striking example of how an old industry can extract NEW value by rethinking the boundaries of its raw materials. Row croppers have done well over the years by utilizing raw materials or byproducts, but it’s this type of thinking by the right people that may uncover even more new opportunities for the crops we grow. (Source: Foodnavigator, foodingredients.com)
