Darkins Chocolate

In their own words

Valorization of Brewer’s spent grain to make cacao free cocoa powder. Brewers spent grain is the wheat or barley, residual streams from the alcohol brewing industries. The sugar and carbohydrates of the grains are used up for fermentation into alcohol. The grains that remain are referred to as Brewers spent grain (BSG) which are a nutrient-rich material that contains many compounds which remain untapped during the brewing process, including: Protein, (around 20% of its composition), Fiber (around 70% of its composition, non-cellulosic polysaccharides), Phenolic compounds, Lipids. The brewers spent grain have a malty and sweet flavor profile which is a great opportunity to use for making valuable upcycled food products. Our technology employs solid state micro fermentation using Koji spores, to convert a low value side stream into a high value functional ingredient, cacao free cocoa powder. The obtained cacao free cocoa powder has an entire range of applications including baking, confectionary, beverages. Cacao beans production comes with many ecological and environmental challenges. The cacao agriculture is water and resource intensive; climate change has further impacted the yield, leading to sky rocketing prices of cacao. Higher yields of cacao have led to mass deforestation in the past, the supply chain is rife with child and slave labor. In a conventional cacao processing unit, the cacao beans derived from the cocoa pods are fermented to achieve their desired chocolaty malty flavor and then roasted to make the cacao mass. Very parallel to this, a combination of brewers spent grain and local millets of India are fermented using koji spores as the microbes under precise temperature and humidity conditions, to come to a desired chocolaty and malty profile. These are then roasted under a set temperature for a set duration, which then grinds into a perfectly tasting and smelling cocoa powder. We are confident that a combination of brewer’s spent grain with our Country’s local millets, a blend that we will fine tune with our further trials, will give us perfect sensory and functional results. The aim is to make it a highly scalable product so that the real big impact of shifting from cacao to brewers spent grain side stream is made.

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