Voyage Foods is making nut-free peanut butter and cocoa-free chocolate | Changsha ClearMindset Innovations Group Co.,Ltd

There was a time when peanut butter was the hero of school lunches. Today, it’s the villain.

Allergies are serious business. Over 6 million people in the U.S. are allergic to the legume. Even airlines stopped handing out little bags of nuts. But new choices aim to please sandwich lovers and fill candies like “peanut butter” cups without the nuts — or even the chocolate around it.

Voyage Foods, a startup in West Oakland, has raised more than $40 million on that premise. Its first products, creamy peanut-free spread and decadent hazelnut- and cocoa-free “chocolate” modeled on Nutella, have even made their way onto school cafeteria menus in the Bay Area.

In addition to its peanut-free spread, Voyage joins a clutch of startups that are making chocolate without cacao, including Planet A Foods, California Cultured and WNWN Food Labs. The chocolate business, despite COVID and inflation, was up 9.1% in 2022, for a valuation of $23.9 billion, according to the National Confectioners Association.

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Four billion of that dollar figure was pulled in over the seven-week Valentine’s Day season. If Voyage could capture 1% of that amount, they would match its investors’ money. And CEO Adam Maxwell would love to see his chocolate-free ingredient enrobing every heart candy on the shelves of grocery stores.

Maxwell founded Voyage in 2021, but his love affair with food began much earlier. He asked his parents for a KitchenAid stand mixer for his bar mitzvah, and later channeled his interest into a food chemistry degree from McGill University.

Voyage Foods makes faux chocolate chip and peanut-free cookies at its Oakland headquarters. Ultimately, the startup wants to provide ingredients to other brands as an allergen-free and climate-resilient base for foods — perhaps coating M&M’s or Snickers bars.

In starting Voyage, Maxwell’s idea was this: With our climate changing rapidly, how can we make our favorite products accessible forever? Peanut butter, chocolate and coffee topped his list because of their systemic production issues.

“Either someone’s gonna be paying $50 for a cup of coffee in 20 or 30 years, or they’re gonna be doing things like this,” he said.

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Chocolate is a commodity concealed in complexity. The World Wildlife Fund reports that three-quarters of the world’s cocoa is grown in West Africa, where cultivation of cacao is the leading cause of deforestation, and prices are breaking records due to extreme weather conditions. The industry is propped up on small-scale farmers who aren’t paid a living wage for their work and live in extreme poverty, and it can involve child labor: According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 1.56 million children were involved in cocoa production in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which produce almost 60% of the world’s cacao.

Cacao beans are harvested from pods, with the beans and pulp inside fermented for flavor. Beans are then dried, roasted, removed from their shells and ground. The last step is tempering, which creates the solid chocolate bar most of us love.

“I think chocolate is, like from a technical perspective, the most beautiful, amazing food matrix,” Maxwell said.

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To mimic flavors, Maxwell hired food scientist Kelsey Tenney to head research and development at Voyage. Maxwell and Tenney used molecular chemistry to find the notes that were driving the strongest taste in peanut butter and chocolate. The pair was familiar with this kind of detective work from their time working at Endless West, a “molecular spirits” company that makes synthetic whiskey without grain or aging time in barrels.

You can’t find Voyage’s chocolate in a candy bar yet, but the base is found in the hazelnut-free chocolate spread. Some of its ingredients are roasted like traditional cocoa beans, and others are tailored to match the flavor profile of Voyage’s final target. It also uses compounds made from yeast or fungi to fill in gaps. “It’s difficult to impart a bright citrus or floral note using thermal processes,” Tenney said. “But often these top notes are important to add complexity.”

Voyage’s ingredients are processed in-house on the same equipment used by chocolate makers, plus a few proprietary machines in a 25,000-square-foot facility in West Oakland. It’s also Voyage’s headquarters, with a little bit of everything: tiny mismatched desks, one conference room and a lab filled with scientists using spectrometers, analyzing compounds, mapping out possible source materials, and developing flavors. The majority of the space is set aside for ingredient storage, pallets of product and whirring machines picked up at auction.

Tasting a square of semisweet Voyage chocolate is slightly bizarre. The mouthfeel is excellent, but also with a hint of “hmm, something here is different.” Crunch into it on a chocolate-covered pretzel, however, and you might hardly notice. Ultimately, the startup wants to provide ingredients to other brands as an allergen-free and climate-resilient base for future foods — perhaps coating M&M’s or Snickers bars. To prove Voyage’s merit, Maxwell decided to make branded products first.

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Shortbread glides through a waterfall of faux chocolate at Voyage Foods in Oakland on Feb. 5. The company specializes in creating faux chocolate and peanut butter without using real cocoa or peanuts.

Compared with chocolate, peanut butter might seem simple. You need peanuts, salt and a machine to grind them. But making a delicious spread that evokes peanut butter — the roasted flavor, smooth texture and fatty consistency — with none of the same ingredients was difficult.

Tenney started with sunflower seed butters. But she found most on the market had musty or even rancid flavors. Unlike Voyage’s approach, she said, “These products aim to have general roasty notes, but they’re not mimicking peanut butter by design.”

Because peanut butter is so wholesome — high in protein and natural fats — Voyage wanted to make its own from similarly uncluttered whole-food ingredients. Both the peanut-free and “hazelnut” spreads use roasted sunflower kernels, grape seeds and a protein blend either from chickpea and rice or sunflower, plus sugar and palm oil.

Voyage Foods’ head of research and development Kelsey Tenney, left, and founder Adam Maxwell in the company’s Oakland headquarters. Voyage has raised more than $40 million to develop products including peanut-free and hazelnut-free spreads.

Voyage has landed in specialty grocers like Nugget Markets, Mollie Stone’s and Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. But Maxwell always had his eye on a bigger fish. “When we started the company, everyone asked, ‘When are you going to be in Whole Foods? ’ And it’s funny because America shops at Walmart.

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In an unusual twist, Voyage was written up for its packaging in a trade magazine seen by Walmart’s senior buyer of spreads. One visit later to Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., and Voyage is now available at 1,250 stores nationally for $4.48 per 16-ounce jar. It’s also at more than 200 Save Mart, Lucky and FoodMaxx stores across the Bay Area.

How close is Voyage to its ambitious climate goals? A recent analysis performed by an independent third party found Voyage’s chocolate process uses less water and produces 84% less greenhouse gas emissions than traditional chocolate. While this is preliminary data on manufacturing that has yet to reach scale, it’s still promising.

Howard Yana-Shapiro, retired chief agricultural officer for Mars Inc., applauds Voyage’s innovation and considers the peanut-free spread a potential win for candy producers — a market he called “insatiable.” But for chocolate, he isn’t convinced Voyage is solving the right problem. How does this support farmers, develop new cultivars that are higher yield and drought-resistant, or break up a food chain with an inordinate number of layers?

“I’m enthusiastic for them,” Yana-Shapiro said. “But chocolate is very, very complicated.”

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Production supervisor Stephanie Vongsy directs semisweet, faux chocolate, easy-melt wafers as they slide down a panel after leaving the cooling tunnel at Voyage Foods in Oakland on Feb. 5. The chocolate business, despite COVID and inflation, was up 9.1% in 2022, for a valuation of $23.9 billion, according to the National Confectioners Association.

Yet chocolate could be key for the company. While Voyage’s peanut butter substitute is enticing, its bigger flavor draw is the hazelnut-free chocolate spread. The Oakland Unified School District, a nut- and chocolate-free district, tried out the alt-chocolate spread over the summer. After unanimous kid approval, it’s now served at about 70 schools every two weeks on the district’s supper menu, a meal provided to kids attending after-school programs.

Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer and author of “Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat”