by WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Climate change is stressing rainforests where the delicate cocoa bean grows, but chocolate lovers need not despair, say companies researching ways others to grow cocoa or to develop cocoa substitutes.
Scientists and entrepreneurs are working on ways to make more cocoa that stretch far beyond the tropics, from Northern California to Israel.
California Cultured, a plant cell culture company, is growing cacao from cell cultures at a facility in West Sacramento, California, and plans to begin selling its products next year. It entangles cocoa bean cells with sugar water so they reproduce quickly and reach maturity in a week rather than the six or eight months that traditional harvesting takes, said Alan Perlstein, the company’s chief executive. The process no longer requires as much water or hard labor.
“We just see the demand for chocolate outpacing the supply,” Perlstein said. “There is really no other way that we see that the world could significantly increase the supply of cocoa or keep it at affordable levels yet without extensive environmental degradation or other significant cost.”
Cocoa trees grow about 20 degrees north and south of the equator in regions with warm weather and abundant rainfall, including West Africa and South America. Climate change is expected to dry out the land under the added heat. So scientists, entrepreneurs and chocolatiers are coming up with ways to grow cacao and make the crop more resilient and pest-resistant—as well as chocolate-flavored cacao alternatives to meet demand.
The market for chocolate is huge with sales in the United States to exceed $25 billion in 2023, according to the National Confectionery Association. Many entrepreneurs are betting on demand growing faster than cocoa supply. Companies are looking to bolster the supply with cell-based cocoa or offer alternatives made from products ranging from oats to carob that are roasted and flavored to produce a chocolate flavor for chips or fillings.
The price of cocoa rose sharply earlier this year due to demand and crop troubles in West Africa caused by plant diseases and weather changes. The region produces most of the world’s cocoa.
“All of this contributes to potential supply instability, so it’s attractive to these lab-cultivated or cocoa-substitute companies to think of ways to make that ingredient that we know chocolate taste like,” said Carla D. Martin , executive. director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute and lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
The innovation is largely driven by the demand for chocolate in the United States and Europe, Martin said. Although three-quarters of the world’s cocoa is grown in West and Central Africa, only 4% is consumed there, she said.
The push to produce cocoa inside the US comes after other products, such as chicken meat, have already been cultivated in laboratories. It also comes as supermarket shelves are being filled with emerging snack options — which developers of cocoa alternatives say show people are ready to experiment with the look and taste of a chocolate chip cookie even if the chip contains a cocoa substitute.
They said they also hope to take advantage of growing awareness among consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow it, particularly the use of child labor in the cocoa industry.
Planet A Foods in Planegg, Germany, argues that the flavor of mass-market chocolate is largely derived from the fermentation and roasting to make it, not the cocoa beans themselves. The company’s founders tested ingredients from olives to seaweed and settled on a combination of oats and sunflower seeds as the best-tasting chocolate option, said Jessica Karch, a company spokeswoman. They called it “ChoViva” and it can be vacuum-packed into baked goods, she said.
“The idea is not to replace the 80% high-quality dark chocolate, but to have many different products in the supermarket,” said Karch.
But while some want to create alternative sources and substitutes for cocoa, others want to boost the supply of cocoa where it grows naturally. Mars, which makes M&Ms and Snickers, has a research facility at the University of California, Davis focused on making cocoa plants more resilient, said Joanna Hwu, the company’s senior director of cocoa plant science. The facility houses a living collection of cocoa trees so scientists can study what makes them disease-resistant to help farmers in producing countries and ensure a stable supply of beans.
“We see it as an opportunity, and our responsibility,” Hwu said.
In Israel, efforts are also underway to increase the supply of cocoa. Celleste Bio is taking cocoa bean cells and growing them indoors to produce cocoa powder and cocoa butter, said co-founder Hanne Volpin. In a few years, the company hopes to be able to produce cocoa regardless of the impact of climate change and disease – an effort that has attracted interest from Mondelez, the maker of Cadbury chocolate.
“We only have a small field, but eventually, we will have a bioreactor farm,” Volpin said.
That’s similar to the effort underway by California Cultured, which plans to seek permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to call its product chocolate, because, according to Perlstein, that’s what it is.
It could end up being called brewery chocolate, or local chocolate, but less chocolate, he said, because it is genetically identical even though it is not harvested from a tree.
“We basically see that we are growing cacao – just in a different way,” said Perlstein.
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A taxi was reported from Santa Ana, California.
