Guests filed into the United Airlines hangar at LAX on a warm spring morning for an exclusive look at what’s next in air travel, cuisine, and hospitality. The hangar paused normal operations to transform into a sprawling exhibition hall filled with the near-future ambitions of one of America’s largest airline carriers. As media jockeyed for first looks at redesigned cabins and on-board offerings, they made their way to an unexpected breakthrough. Bowls filled with blue-wrapped treats labelled “A Bite of the Future” sat on a table between towering jets and next-generation electric aircraft. Chocolate by any other name, these sweets hinted at a lifeline for a cocoa industry facing formidable systemic challenges.
Chocolate might seem a surprising source of innovation at an airline showcase, but as a United Airlines Venture portfolio company, we see the scale of aviation innovation as a fitting backdrop for our food system ambitions. A Bite of the Future is a collaboration between Savor and TCHO Chocolate that blends our EcoButter™ (a dairy-free milkfat alternative) with TCHO’s single-origin cocoa into sweets with paradigm-shifting substance. To understand what makes these treats worthy of their name, we need to first consider the straits the chocolate industry currently finds itself in.
The chocolate on store shelves around the world is at the mercy of climate change-related supply shocks. Over the past decade, cocoa prices have surged 400%[1] due to global shortages caused by years of drought-stricken harvests in West Africa. This price spike, along with the unsustainable ecological demands of the palm oil used in more than half of chocolate products, leaves the industry at an existential crossroads.
“We are living through a period in which climate change is arriving not as a dramatic event most people can point to, but as a slow degradation of things they love,” wrote Chiara Cecchini, Savor’s SVP of Commercialization, in a recent Food Dive article. “The ingredient your grandmother used, the flavor you grew up on, the product that felt like it would never change — it is changing because the agricultural systems that produced it are under stress that is not going away.”
Under these increasingly challenging conditions, food producers are backed into a corner. They’ve responded by raising prices, shrinking portions, and swapping ingredients for cheaper alternatives. All unappealing options, but the only ones available in a food system built on the assumption ingredients would remain readily available and cheap. As consumers push back on low-quality ingredient swaps and shrinkflation, it’s clear the way out won’t come from within a broken system. Our partnership with TCHO emerges as one answer to this challenge — a first step toward escaping this scarcity.
The Savor EcoButter™ in A Bite of the Future is made without the land, water, and fertilizer inputs of agriculture. Instead, we combine carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to produce a high-performing fat without the ecological toll and supply constraints of conventional fats. In these sweets, we replaced dairy milkfat with EcoButter™, but crucially, this is only our first swap. Our platform molecularly mimics every type of fat and oil. As we scale, this means the cocoa butter, palm oil, and other fats used in chocolate production can be replaced with readily available, sustainable ingredients that deliver the richness and indulgence that we all crave when we reach for chocolate.
Entering the chocolate space in partnership with TCHO feels like a natural fit. TCHO’s commitment to sourcing transparency, direct farmer partnerships, and entirely plant-based product line were the perfect starting point for collaboration. Not to mention, Brad Kintzer, the company’s Chief Chocolate Maker, is a modern-day Willy Wonka who has made a name for himself by challenging convention in pursuit of new confectionary possibilities. Pairing 65% Ghanaian cacao with 5% Savor EcoButter™ in A Bite of the Future produced a distinctly dark chocolate taste with a soft bite and texture more characteristic of milk chocolate. This best-of-both-worlds hybrid is a breakthrough made possible by EcoButter™'s creamy texture and neutral taste, which enable the full cacao flavor to touch down on taste buds without the taste — or ecological hangups — of dairy milkfat.
Following the United Airlines showcase, our team co-presented a sold-out San Francisco Climate Week edition of the TCHO Chocolate factory tour. Attendees were invited behind-the-scenes to explore how the chocolate goes from bean-to-bar with an in-depth look at sourcing, testing, and processing. We capped the tour off with A Bite of the Future tasting, where the 35-person tour group reveled in the first public taste of the Savor x TCHO partnership. The excited initial reactions throughout the room signaled something that’s more difficult to manufacture: a genuine appetite for food that doesn't ask people to accept less indulgence in exchange for sustainability. Chocolate lovers are eager for what's coming next. We just need to make it.
