Chocolate bars made of mushroom milk and Filipino cacao are gaining traction in the United States.
These bars called Tomorrow Bars are being sold by the Filipino-owned startup brand Oodaalolly.
This product was promoted on an online forum about food from the Philippines called r/filipinofood.
“Our latest chocolate uses Philippine cacao and a new kind of milk that’s not from cows or plants, it’s from a digital dairy!” the post reads.
The Redditor showed photos of the chocolate bar with unique, intricate engravings. The product is wrapped in colorful packaging.
Oodaalolly Chocolate or Oodaalolly is led by two entrepreneurs—Hernan Lauber and Jeremy Burnich.
The mushroom milk chocolate bar is their new project. To sustain it, they started an online fundraising campaign via Kickstarter. This link is attached to the Reddit post.
The owners have so far reached a $2,892 pledge out of the target of goal $12,300 in their online fundraising.
Oodaalolly on Instagram also released a short video that briefly showed how these chocolate bars were made.
“The rumors are true. We are milking mushrooms for chocolate. Maybe you’re wondering how it tastes. Well, it tastes like Swiss-style milk chocolate — creamy and smooth,” the caption reads.
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How mushroom chocolates are made
In their Kickstarter project, Lauber and Burnich detailed that the mushroom-made products are made of a fungus specie called Trichoderma reesei through a milking process called fermentation.
Fermentation, which is the same process as how alcoholic drinks are made, produces milk proteins that are identical to animal dairy.
These proteins are then added to melted Filipino cacao to create mushroom-made milk chocolate bars.
“Rather than waving a wand and casting a spell, recombinant DNA is used to coax T. Reesei into producing milk proteins identical to those from a cow,” they said.
“We took those milk proteins, added them to our chocolate, and voilà—a tasty bar of mushroom milk chocolate,” they added.
To help them with this innovation, they also partnered with Perfect Day, a US-based company that uses fermentation to produce animal-free dairy.
For context, mushrooms are the “fruiting body (sporophore) of certain fungi”, thus mushrooms are parts of a type of fungi.
Trichoderma reesei or T. reesei, meanwhile, is a common filamentous fungus often used in the food industry.
“It is among the most prolific producers of plant cell-wall-degrading enzymes and is frequently used in industry for the production of those and other performance proteins,” reads a study that was published via Cell.com.
All about ‘Oodaalolly’
Based on their profiles, Lauber was introduced as a Filipino-born Swiss national who is residing in California, United States with his wife and kids.
He also grew up in a family of chocolate makers. This, therefore, inspired him to go launch his own chocolate business in December 2017.
Burnich, meanwhile, is Lauber’s longtime friend. He later joined him in the business after he helped him with sales and marketing in 2019.
Both Lauber and Burnich have since been creating different Swiss-style artisan chocolates using Filipino ingredients.
Some of their popular chocolate flavors are dark chocolate with calamansi, cocoa tablea, and dark ampalaya.
The name “Oodaalolly,” meanwhile, came from “Oo-De-Lally”, a favorite expression of Lauber’s son.
It is the title of a song from his son’s favorite movie, Walt Disney’s “Robinhood.”