Mars is collaborating with Perfect Day to make a milk chocolate bar featuring animal-free dairy proteins. The new bar, branded as CO2Coa, is available to order online today. CO2Coa is positioned as a eco-friendlier chocolate choice, in line with Mars’ larger goals to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The cocoa for the bar is Rainforest Alliance Certified, and the wrapper is mostly paper. Perfect Day’s dairy proteins are made through precision fermentation in a process that uses up to 99% less water and produces up to 97% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional dairy.
This is the latest food product to launch using Perfect Day’s dairy proteins. They have also been used in ice cream, cream cheese, protein powder, baking mixes, and milk beverages.
With this launch, one thing is crystal clear: companies are finding animal-free dairy to be an acceptable substitute for ingredients that ordinarily come from cows. It doesn’t get much bigger than one of the world’s largest confectioners using these proteins for its very first U.S. chocolate brand using something other than traditional dairy.
Chris Rowe, global vice president of research and development at Mars Wrigley, said that this bar was developed in just under a year—lightning speed in the slower world of new product innovation and production at a big F & B company. And this bar, he said, is better than any chocolate on the market that uses an alternative to milk from cows.