Climate change hits ingredients summary:
- Climate change is increasing risks for key crops including cocoa, coffee, rice and wheat
- Food manufacturers are exploring alternatives such as cocoa-free chocolate, microbial proteins and precision-fermented fats
- Extreme weather and supply chain disruption are making ingredient diversification a strategic priority
- Companies are also investing in crop breeding, AI and genome editing to improve the resilience of conventional ingredients
- Industry experts expect alternative and traditional ingredients to coexist as manufacturers balance sustainability, scalability and cost
Climate change, logistical challenges and geopolitical tensions have been raising the costs of grocery shopping in earnest for the past five years. Now these trends are threatening to change the recipes for many of the products on supermarket shelves, as manufacturers swap out conventional ingredients for something alternative.
The shift occurs as the sector becomes increasingly concerned about its reliance on a handful of increasingly pressurised crops. “Four crops, rice, corn, soybeans, and wheat account for approximately 60% of global calorie consumption and are grown in a handful of critical breadbasket regions of the world,” says Oliver Carpenter, head of environmental analytics at climate risk firm Risilience.
“This heavy reliance on a small number of staple crops, in highly climate-exposed regions, increases the vulnerability of the global food system to climate-related shocks.”
One example is the prospect of a Super El Niño weather event this year, in which sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are 2°C higher than normal, rather than 0.5°C higher. In the worst case scenario this could lead food production to fall by 14%, equivalent to $342bn at 2025 prices, according to Risilience.
Extreme weather could cut rice yields in India, cocoa could come under threat in West Africa, and coffee beans in Latin America could spoil. Manufacturers are therefore “looking at diversifying supply away from vulnerable regions and investing in research to build climate resilience”, Carpenter says.
Natural alternatives
Cocoa is perhaps the most prominent case of a food commodity under strain. Having seen huge price surges over 2024 and 2025 to more than $12,000 per tonne at their peak, cocoa futures have fallen to about $5,000.
Manufacturers are nonetheless nervous that the sector is one severe weather event away from another price hike. As well as bulking out their confectionery with oils, some in the category are seeking more stable alternatives.
Planet A Foods, a German company which makes the chocolate alternative ChoViva out of sunflower seeds, is a case in point. The company is already working with Nestle, which launched a confectionery range in Germany under the Choco Crossies brand using ChoViva this year, and it has teamed up with Barry Callebaut, a premium chocolate maker.
“Alternative choc ingredients are still at an early stage of commercial adoption, but momentum is rapidly building,” says Mark Golder, the CEO of the British cocoa-free confectionery brand Win-Win. It’s part of a wider trend in which alternative ingredients “are becoming an increasingly vital strategic priority for global manufacturers and food suppliers in response to the volatility of cocoa prices and cocoa supply”.
Win-Win uses ingredients like rice and the carob tree to make its chocolate, manufacturing in the UK with up to 80% less water usage and CO2e emissions. The company raised £3m last year to invest in British production and expand into Benelux, France, Germany, the Nordics and Switzerland.
“The resilience and price stability that alternative ingredients offer manufacturers are a huge advantage, helping to diversify the industry’s supply base, and reducing dependence on a single crop that is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change, disease and geopolitical pressures,” Golder says.
Scientific breakthroughs
As the innovative use of ingredients like carob attests, food manufacturers are being bold with their innovation. Some of the results are verging on sci-fi, one example being the German ingredient maker MicroHarvest, which brews microbial protein.
“The decisive advantage is reliability with quality,” explains chief operating officer and co-founder Jonathan Roberz. Bioreactors allow manufacturers to control conditions year-round, ensuring consistent nutritional profiles and steady supply. The process can also take advantage of food byproducts like molasses from sugar refining, which can be cheaper and less intensive to source.
Roberz points to one significant backer of this approach: the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is developing “forward biomanufacturing” or “point-of-need nutrition”, which can create protein directly in the field without relying on normal supply lines. “If it has to work there, it can certainly strengthen everyday supply,” he says.
Precision fermentation fats are another area where similar progress is being seen. Based in Sweden, Melt&Marble creates fats for meat and dairy alternatives, chocolate and baked goods, categories where fat plays a major role.
“Designer fats can be created with properties for specific applications such as melting behaviour, mouthfeel, sensory performance and even health profiles. This allows formulators to go beyond the limits of the natural properties of plant or animal fats and design ingredients around the performance a product actually needs,” says chief business officer Thomas Cresswell.
Where such projects can run into hurdles – aside from the usual concerns around efficiency, scale and cost – is when it comes to regulatory and consumer acceptance.
“Regulatory approval can be a slow process, particularly for novel food ingredients. Manufacturers need evidence on safety, scalability and performance before adopting new ingredients, while consumer acceptance can take time until a new ingredient is normalised,” says Cresswell.
Price barriers
The evidence is also that manufacturers often need a short or at least medium-term commercial incentive to take action. Hikes in commodity prices can send NPD teams into “hyperdrive”, says edible oil manufacturer KTC’s head of business development and sustainability Gary Lewis. But it’s just as easy for the industry to release the accelerator when commodity prices snap back.
“Swapping ingredients is an operational headache,” Lewis explains. “A single ingredient might supply a manufacturer for a product that goes into a hundred different recipes. There is always a natural reluctance from NPD teams to do that tedious work unless there is an immediate, vital rationale to take action.”
He notes that ingredients like vegetable oils have allowed confectionery manufacturers to tweak recipes during the cost-of-living crisis. But consumers are often quick to tell when a recipe has reduced a product’s quality, and the scarcity of alternative ingredients can quickly make them uneconomic too.
As such, Lewis is among the many who expect alternative ingredients will continue to expand the options at the premium end of the food and drink market, rather than supplanting them.
“Everything ultimately boils down to scalability,” he says. “There is a sharp divide between what is idealistic and what is economically viable; what consumers say on surveys is different to what they’re prepared to pay for.”
Conventional investment
While acknowledging the benefits of alternative ingredients, many in the food and drink sector are therefore looking to improve the resilience of conventional crops, driving up the efficiency of inputs like water and nutrients, and even raising yields.
“The food industry cannot substitute its way out of climate risk. Alternatives can help diversify supply, but foundational crops still need to become more stable, more stress-resilient and more efficient under real-world growing conditions,” says Giacomo Bastianelli, CEO and co-founder of Rainbow Crops.
Spun out from the Belgian research institute VIB, Rainbow Crops uses genome editing, AI and precision breeding to improve crops’ resilience to climate change. Targets for their technology have included maize, sorghum and rice, protecting the crops against drought and heat.
Some NGOs are also sceptical of the ethical benefits of alternative ingredients. While acknowledging the genuine value of gains in consistency, supply and lower costs, the Rainforest Alliance highlights that farmers of conventional ingredients in poorer parts of the world are at risk.
“Over five million smallholder farmers depend on cocoa for their livelihoods, most earning below the poverty line. In West Africa, cocoa represents up to 40% of export earnings in some countries,” says Kerry Daroci, the Americas director at the Rainforest Alliance.
“Demand erosion from alternatives, without deliberate intervention, could devastate already vulnerable communities. And precision fermentation, while innovative, is still energy-intensive and largely produced in the Global North, which raises questions about whose sustainability we are actually talking about.”
As for consumers, if alternative ingredients become cheap enough they will lower food costs, but they could also make conventional fare an expensive luxury. For both business and governance reasons, food manufacturers are likely to be using a blend of conventional and alternative ingredients for some time to come.