Let’s talk about chocolate – not the kind you eat, but the kind you wear.

Nutico™ – the first market innovation by Bio2materials, a Warsaw-based research and development company that creates sustainable material solutions based on waste processing and biologically sourced raw materials – is a leather-like material made from cocoa husks and walnut shells. The scientists and designer behind it call it chocolate leather – and yes, it really smells faintly like chocolate.

Born from years of trial, error, and a failed experiment involving apples (turns out apple leather ages faster than you’d want), Nutico is the result of thinking differently about waste. Instead of synthetic binders or water-intensive processes, Nutico is made with zero water, no polyurethane, and no PVC – just food waste, organic cotton, and some very smart chemistry.

It’s not just a material. It’s a confident rethinking of the misconception that sustainability has to compromise on beauty or durability. Soft, rich, tactile – it looks and feels like the real thing, minus the environmental guilt.

“We hope that materials like Nutico will help reduce the use of both natural leather and synthetics. But we don’t expect to eliminate them entirely – there will always be people who prefer traditional leather”,

says Katarzyna Szpicmacher, the founder of Bio2materials.

You’ll start seeing Nutico in fashion, furniture, interiors, maybe even the dashboard of your next car. It’s an investment, but that’s kind of the point – good things take time, and this one took seven years.

Nutico isn’t trying to replace leather. It’s offering a different story – one that begins with a walnut shell and ends with something worth holding onto.

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