Inside the Formula | CocoaVia: The Company Behind One of Nutrition's Biggest Trials

With CocoaVia & TESTED by SuppCo: Inside the Formula is a new sponsored series featuring brands in the TESTED by SuppCo certification program, where we spotlight the fascinating research behind products that have received the certification. Learn more about TESTED by SuppCo.

For more than 20 years, researchers at Mars in collaboration with many research teams around the world have worked to unlock the science of cocoa flavanols, from developing ways to measure these compounds accurately to understanding their effects on human health. That body of research ultimately paved the way for COSMOS, one of the largest nutrition trials ever conducted on a bioactive, which followed 21,442 participants over 3.6 years to evaluate the long-term health effects of cocoa flavanols.

The compounds at the center of the trial are cocoa flavanols. The cocoa flavanol-containing extract used in the trial, Cocoapro™, is the same extract found in CocoaVia products. CocoaVia is now certified through the TESTED by SuppCo program, which verifies that a supplement's label matches what's in the bottle.

Building on the Body of Evidence

Before researchers could determine whether cocoa flavanols influenced human health, they first had to solve a more fundamental challenge: there was no widely accepted way to define, characterize, or measure them. As a result, two laboratories analyzing the same cocoa sample could arrive at very different results, making it difficult to build a consistent body of evidence.

To address this challenge, researchers at Mars, in collaboration with scientists from the USDA, developed one of the first comprehensive cocoa polyphenol databases and helped establish analytical methods for measuring cocoa flavanols. Further developments and a collaboration between Mars, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and AOAC International eventually led to the adoption of these analytical methods as standard methods for the analysis of flavanols. This made it possible to compare findings more reliably across studies and helped advance cocoa flavanol research.

By the time Harvard researchers began planning COSMOS, decades of research by Mars and its academic collaborators, as well as by outside research teams, had produced a significant body of evidence suggesting cocoa flavanols can play a role in cardiovascular health. Looking to test whether those findings could translate into meaningful health outcomes, the study's principal investigators approached Mars about supporting a one-of-its-kind, large-scale randomized, controlled, clinical trial.

COSMOS was initiated, designed, and conducted by Dr. JoAnn Manson and Dr. Howard Sesso of Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. Harvard controlled the study's design, execution, and outcomes analysis, while Mars supported the research.

What the Trial Found

COSMOS tested two things at once: whether cocoa flavanols promote heart health and healthy cardiovascular aging, and whether a multivitamin lowers cancer risk. On the heart-health side, the flavanol group showed a 10% drop in major cardiovascular events, compared to placebo, but that result was not statistically significant. However, when researchers removed those people from the outcomes analysis (those who self-identified as not having taken the pills), there was a 15% reduction in cardiovascular events in the flavanol group compared to placebo.

Secondary measures also showed strong results: People taking flavanols were 27% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than people on placebo. Among those who took their pills consistently, that number rose to 39%.

What It Did for Memory

Researchers at Columbia University conceived and led COSMOS-Web, a trial under the COSMOS study umbrella that explored the effects of flavanols on memory and cognitive aging.  Participants took a memory test tied to the dentate gyrus, the part of the hippocampus that forms new memories and responds to both aging and diet, paired with brain scans instead of a simple questionnaire. 

A closer look at just over 3,500 of those people focused on people with lower-quality diets and low flavanol intake. After a year of taking flavanols, their memory scores improved compared to placebo, and their cognitive performance in select tests was now as good as the performance of people on high-quality, high-flavanol diets, who did not have memory trouble in the first place. This gain of function held for the full three years of the study.

People who already ate a lot of flavanols saw no extra benefit. This shows that while the supplement fixes a shortfall, it won’t push memory past a normal, healthy level.

Many supplement trials never combine brain scans with a memory task built around that exact part of the brain. Many drug trials don't either.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way yet to check your own flavanol level. As research in nutrition science and biomarker testing continues to evolve, tools that make it easier to assess flavanol intake may be on the horizon.

Cocoa: From Farm to Blender

Normal chocolate processing can substantially reduce flavanolscocoa starts with. Fermenting, sun-drying, pressing out the cocoa butter with heat, and treating the cocoa with alkali all strip flavanols away.

Most chocolate on shelves today has almost no flavanols left by the time it's wrapped.

As scientists continued to learn more about cocoa flavanols, they also began examining how these compounds behave in everyday life, including how common foods might affect their absorption and effectiveness.

Researchers at UC Davis, in collaboration with Mars Scientists, have also explored how cocoa flavanols interact with everyday foods. One unexpected finding involved bananas, which contain an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase (PPO). When consumed together, PPO can reduce flavanol bioavailability, meaning the body absorbs less of the beneficial compounds.

One Core Bioactive

CocoaVia sells two core product lines: 500 milligrams of cocoa flavanols, the same level used in COSMOS, and a higher, 750-milligram version of the same extract, a level that claims memory improvement within 8-12 weeks. That's the lineup.

Simply put… CocoaVia prefers to focus on one bioactive instead of launching new products every year.

The one thing to take away about CocoaVia is that almost everything it does traces back to one compound, tested for over twenty years, in more ways than most supplements ever get tested.

What This Means for You

• Serving: 500 milligrams of cocoa flavanols a day matches the levels tested in COSMOS. The 750-milligram version is the same formula, just more concentrated per serving.

• Timing: Keep bananas and other fruits high in the enzyme polyphenol oxidase, like bananas, apples, and avocados, away from ingesting cocoa flavanols, since blending them together actually destroys the flavanols, and along with that, the benefits.

• Consistency: The strongest COSMOS result, a 39% lower risk of cardiovascular death came from participants who took at least 75% of their pills over a median of 3.6 years.

• What it won't do: If your diet already has plenty of flavanols, taking more won't add extra memory benefit (sorry, no “limitless” option here).

The Bottom Line

CocoaVia exists because researchers spent decades defining, measuring, and testing one bioactive compound, all to build a strong scientific foundation for the brand.

CocoaVia, welcome to the TESTED by SuppCo family.