New Scientist
What if chocolate didn’t come from cocoa trees but from labs? Lab-grown chocolate could offer cleaner, more sustainable production, addressing issues like climate change and pesticide contamination. However, the road ahead includes hurdles such as cost, production scale, and impacts on cocoa farmers. Will it win over consumers?
Inside the mouth-watering race to master lab-grown chocolate
Author: Michael Le Page
IT IS by far the rarest and most exclusive chocolate I have ever eaten. In fact, you can’t even buy it in shops. It doesn’t look that special, though – just a few flattened droplets a slightly lighter shade than most dark chocolate, sealed in a tiny plastic bag.
It smells like dark chocolate and tastes like it, too, but better – less bitter. Most of all, for me, there is no doubt that this is the real thing.
That is important because what I am eating wasn’t made using cocoa beans sourced from trees like normal chocolate. Rather, it was grown in a glass flask by California Cultured, one of several firms aiming to mass-produce chocolate in vats using cell culture technology.
Cultured chocolate could be even better than the tree-grown kind, claims Alan Perlstein, CEO of the company, with higher levels of chemicals such as polyphenols that might have health benefits, no contaminants such as heavy metals taken up from the soil or pesticides sprayed on crops, and a taste that rivals anything on the market now. “We’re trying to create flavours that are almost unobtainable through traditional chocolate manufacturing,” he says.
For many chocolate companies, however, the main appeal of getting raw ingredients from vats instead of trees is the potentially unlimited supply. Climate change is hitting cacao farms hard, leading to shortages – the price of cocoa beans has quadrupled after remaining relatively stable for decades.
So, can chocolate grown in a vat really compete with the tree-grown variety on price? And will consumers embrace it?
Melting in the heat
Cocoa beans, the raw material that becomes chocolate, are the seeds of the cacao tree, native to South America but now grown more widely in tropical regions around the equator. The fruits, called pods, that contain the beans are harvested by hand, chopped from the tree with a knife and split open to reveal the wet beans inside. The beans are fermented, roasted and ground up, then separated into cocoa butter, which provides the melt-in-the-mouth texture of finished chocolate, and cocoa solids, which give the flavour. Dark chocolate is made by combining cocoa solids with cocoa butter and usually some sweeteners. Milk chocolate contains milk powder or condensed milk as well, while white chocolate is made using cocoa butter with no cocoa solids.
But while demand for chocolate is rising, in recent years, supply has been falling. “Every chocolate company is desperate,” says Perlstein.
Global warming is making it harder to grow cacao trees: rising temperatures are rendering conditions too hot and rainfall is more erratic, while trees weakened by extreme weather are more vulnerable to pests and disease.
“Climate change will definitely affect the yields,” says Thomas Wanger at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, whose team has shown that higher temperatures have just this effect.
More than half of all cocoa beans come from West Africa, so any extreme weather or disease outbreak there has a big effect on global supply. In January 2025, for example, a particularly dry Harmattan wind blowing in from the Sahara caused pods to wither on the trees and cocoa prices to soar. Chronic problems, such as illegal gold mining, which pollutes soil and water resources, are also affecting many farms in that area.
The cultured approach
Lab-grown chocolate could remove the unpredictability of relying on tree-grown chocolate. “Years ago, we started to think, OK, climate change is affecting the yield and the quality of the cocoa,” says Heli Anttila at Fazer, a Finnish chocolate company that has been working on lab-grown cocoa. “We need to have alternatives. Cocoa is an important raw material.”
Working with selected cacao varieties, cultured-chocolate makers take a small number of cells that would normally form the cocoa beans. They place the cells in a liquid medium containing nutrients and plant hormones, which can be extracted from other foods such as rice and coconut milk. In the lab, the cells are grown in glass flasks, with the liquid turning dark brown as the cells divide and mature. The resulting material, ready in about a week, is fermented and roasted. For commercial production, the cells would be grown in large, stainless steel vats. It doesn’t matter that the texture of the brown paste that is produced is different to that of tree-grown beans, as both are very finely ground to produce chocolate.
Tilo Hühn at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland says the chemical composition of cultured cocoa bean cells is very similar to that of tree-grown beans. “In our cell cultures, we find comparable concentrations, in some cases higher concentrations, of polyphenols and aroma components,” says Hühn, who started trying to culture chocolate more than a decade ago. “This is really close to production on trees. It’s not the same, but it’s close to it.”
Creating cocoa in a lab can also be done as needed, rather than waiting on seasonal harvests or the three to five years it takes for newly planted cacao trees to start fruiting. Cell-culture products should be more consistent because every aspect of the process can be controlled.
At the moment, the level of cocoa butter, which normally makes up half of the raw product obtained from the pods of the cacao tree, is lower in lab-grown cocoa than is ideal. The sample I tried contained added tree-grown cocoa butter to smooth out the texture, but Perlstein says California Cultured has got cocoa butter percentage levels to “double figures” by tweaking conditions to keep cells in the cocoa butter-producing stage for longer. The company aims to increase that figure further. Another option would be to add other vegetable fats to the mix to make chocolate, as is routine in countries such as the UK.
The biggest challenge now is ramping up production to an industrial scale, at a cost comparable to that of tree-grown chocolate. What is clear is this is much more feasible with cultured chocolate than with one of the other lab-grown foods making headlines, cultured meat. For that, the growth medium can cost upwards of $20 a litre and the cells often die en masse, says Hühn. With a 50,000-litre vat, say, that is a massive loss. But plant cells are much less prone to dying and the growth medium is far cheaper. Perlstein says California Cultured has got the cost of the growth medium below $1 per litre and is aiming to get it down to 2 cents.
Achieving price parity with conventional chocolate also got a lot easier when cocoa prices hit an all-time high in December 2024 – around $12,000 a tonne, up from around $3000 a tonne in 2023. “It was insane,” says Hühn. “This makes the cocoa field, let’s say, more interesting.” Perlstein thinks prices of farmed cocoa could quadruple again.
We’re trying to create flavours that are almost unattainable through traditional methods
Assuming mass production is feasible, it is likely to be at least a year before cultured chocolate is sold commercially in the US, longer in Europe. As a new kind of food, it will require regulatory approval, and it isn’t clear whether it will legally be able to call itself chocolate.
If and when when it does hit shelves, should we buy it? Farming chocolate is, like nearly every crop, bad for the environment. In most places, cacao trees are grown as a monoculture on deforested land, so meeting rising demand with cultured chocolate rather than more farms of this sort could prevent further deforestation. Ethically, too, some cacao farming has a reputation for using forced labour, sometimes provided by trafficked children; cultured chocolate requires very little labour at all.
However, though lab-grown chocolate could alleviate some concerns, it might introduce others. Making the growth medium requires growing more of other crops, and though the approach might have environmental benefits overall, says Wanger, detailed studies will have to be done to confirm this. And then there is the impact on the more than 5 million small farmers across the world who produce cocoa beans. “It would definitely be bad news for farmers,” says Bart Van Besien, cocoa supply chain expert at Oxfam Belgium. “Millions of families depend on income from cocoa.”
At the moment, however, global demand is growing so fast that it seems unlikely that cultured chocolate will put farmers out of business. “There is a huge difference now between supply and demand,” says Tal Govrin at Israel-based cultured chocolate start-up Kokomodo. “We see ourselves as filling the gap.”
Ultimately, of course, the success of cultured chocolate will come down to whether consumers buy it. Having tried it, I know I, for one, would.
Credits: TCA, LLC