Our Research & Results
We tested it.
Here's what happened.
Five days. Thirty-five habitual coffee drinkers. One simple morning swap.
In August 2024, we asked a group of habitual coffee drinkers to replace their morning coffee with an 82.5% dark hot-chocolate shot.
We wanted to know what they experienced.
The results gave us more questions than answers — which turned out to be exactly what we needed.
Research Pilot 01 · August 2024
Could dark chocolate create a different kind of morning?
We invited habitual coffee drinkers aged 28–65 to make one change for five days.
Participants typically drank three to four cups of coffee each day.
During the pilot, they swapped their usual morning coffee for an 82.5% dark hot-chocolate shot and recorded their experience across the five days.
Habitual coffee drinkers.
A short real-world exploratory pilot.
Average baseline intake.
The morning hot-chocolate shot.
Before they started
described themselves as “coffee addicts.”
Which made what happened over the next five days considerably more interesting.
Day five
And then we asked how they felt.
These were self-reported experiences from an exploratory, uncontrolled pilot.
enjoyed the taste.
For a group being asked to replace a deeply familiar morning coffee ritual, taste mattered.
Self-reported · Day 5reported better mood.
Participants described a positive difference in mood across the day during the five-day pilot.
Self-reported · Day 5reported sleeping better.
Sleep was not objectively measured, but three quarters of participants reported an improvement in their own sleep experience.
Self-reported · Day 5said they didn't miss coffee.
Perhaps one of the more surprising observations from a group of habitual coffee drinkers.
Self-reported · Day 5Change from baseline
There were other signals too.
Participants also recorded changes in how they experienced energy, mental clarity, focus and productivity.
One participant put it rather well
“I thought giving up my morning coffee would be like trying to run a marathon backwards — impossible and slightly crazy. But this chocolate shot? It's like upgrading from a flip phone to a smartphone. Same job, way better execution!”Trevor · Pilot participant
So, did chocolate beat coffee?
Not so fast.
There was no control group.
Participants were self-selected.
Outcomes were self-reported rather than independently measured.
The pilot lasted only five days.
It therefore cannot establish that the chocolate caused the reported changes.
What can we say?
Thirty-five habitual coffee drinkers tried something different.
Several encouraging patterns appeared.
And those patterns were interesting enough to justify asking better questions.
The result that mattered most
It changed what we did next.
The five-day experiment wasn't the end of the research.
It became the beginning.
What we observed helped shape the questions, product development and research direction that followed.
From observation to R&D
A result creates another question.
Since that first pilot, our work has moved beyond simply asking how people feel after drinking the chocolate.
We are also interested in formulation, cacao percentage, serving size, texture, dispersion and the way real chocolate behaves when we ask it to do something new.
Some research happens with participants. Some happens in formulation. Some happens inside machinery.
What we still need to know
One small pilot didn't give us all the answers.
It gave us better questions.
What role does cacao itself play? What changes when dose, timing or cacao percentage changes? How much belongs to the product, and how much belongs to ritual, expectation and individual response?
Those are the questions that deserve more rigorous research.
Our Research & Results
Show the result.
Show the limitation.
Ask the next question.
That's the kind of research culture we're building around 80Noir Ultra®.
Research Pilot 01: 80Noir Ultra® exploratory in-house pilot, August 2024. n=35 habitual coffee drinkers aged 28–65. Five-day intervention replacing participants' morning coffee with an 82.5% dark hot-chocolate shot. Participants were self-selected and outcomes were self-reported. There was no control group. Findings should therefore be interpreted as exploratory observations rather than evidence of causation.
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