Cocoa-Free Chocolate, Real Taste: Accelerating Market Acceptance and Go-to-Marke
Cocoa-free chocolate promises a new future for the industry. But what makes consumers and businesses adopt it? This project identifies the key drivers of acceptance to enable a successful and scalable market entry.
Factsheet
- Schools involved Business School
- Institute(s) Institute for Marketing & Global Management
- Research unit(s) Marketing
- Strategic thematic field Thematic field "Sustainable Development"
- Funding organisation Innosuisse
- Duration (planned) 18.02.2026 - 18.08.2026
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Head of project
Prof. Dr. Elisa Konya-Baumbach
Prof. Dr. Sabrina Stöckli - Project staff Prof. Dr. Elisa Konya-Baumbach
- Partner Food Brewer AG
Situation
The chocolate industry faces supply, environmental, and ethical challenges, while demand remains high. Food Brewer develops cocoa-free chocolate as an alternative. To succeed, cocoa-free chocolate must convince both business-to-business- and business-to-customer-audiences in terms of taste, functionality, and price. This project addresses the challenge of market acceptance by generating actionable evidence to guide product design, positioning, pricing, and communication.
Course of action
The project follows a multi-method research design to generate robust, decision-relevant insights for market entry. It combines exploratory qualitative methods (e.g. interviews) with large-scale quantitative surveys to capture consumer perceptions, needs, and acceptance drivers across segments. A central component is large-scale product testing through controlled tasting studies of the cocoa-free chocolate to measure effects on perception, purchase intention, and word-of-mouth as well as product framing and communication approaches.
