This faux chocolate made from a beer byproduct is your new (sustainable) sweet-tooth fix

Chocolate is one of life’s great pleasures, but this nostalgia-steeped treat is burdened with a dark side. Not only is the harvesting of cocoa largely unregulated (resulting in child labour and devastating working conditions), chocolate’s environmental impact is enormous. Meeting the growing demand for chocolate means significant deforestation in biodiverse regions. What’s more, it takes between 1,500 to 2,000 litres of water to produce a single 100g chocolate bar.

Enter THIC, a chocolate substitute developed by a trio of former Amass employees (a three-Michelin-starred, sustainability-focused Copenhagen restaurant that closed its doors in 2022). Made with a byproduct of beer production, THIC (which stands for ‘This isn’t chocolate’) is not only sustainable, it tastes just like the real thing. “In the beginning, it tasted like shit of course,” says Maximillian Bogenmann, CEO and co-founder of Endless Food Co., the Danish food innovators behind THIC. “But over the course of two years of research and development and all the feedback that we got, I think we’ve landed on something that’s pretty damn good.”

It took over 300 prototypes to arrive at the final product. But how did Bogenmann and co-founders Matthew Orlando (former head chef at Amass) and Christian Bach know that Brewers Spent Grain (BSG) could be transformed into a chocolate dupe in the first place? “Well, it’s kind of brown and it kind of smells a little bit sticky,” says Bogenmann. Building on the ethos instilled at Amass – namely, working at the intersection of “deliciousness and sustainability” – they set out to find an application for some of the 40 million tons of BSG produced worldwide each year. “There’s still flavour, there’s still nutrition in this product, so we said, ‘Let’s figure out a way to use this’,” says Bach. “It sort of had a slight resemblance to chocolate.”

Though THIC can exist in bar form, the intention is for it to be used as an ingredient rather than a standalone snack. A handful of beloved Copenhagen restaurants and bakeries including Il Buco and La Banchina are already using the stuff in cakes and croissants. Taste-wise, it doesn’t compete with complex, artisanal chocolates, but rather those everyday, mass market treats. “When someone says, ‘This tastes like calendar chocolate’, we’re like, ‘That’s f***ing perfect’,” says Bogenmann. Recently, the company relocated its production to expand from producing about 50 kilos of THIC per week to 10 times that.

Related: Why are we so obsessed with liquorice in Scandinavia?

Chocoholics can relax – the goal is not to replace chocolate altogether. “If you don’t want to drink oat milk, you don’t have to, but if you go to a cafe, it will be there if you want it,” says Bogenmann by way of comparison. “At the core, we’re optimists. There are systemic problems and we can’t address them all, but we would like to be part of the solution – part of making the existing chocolate world slightly better.”