Companies Are Crafting New Ways To Grow Cocoa, And Chocolate Alternatives, To Keep Up With Demand

West Sacramento, California – Climate change is straining the rainforests where the very sensitive cocoa bean grows, but chocolate lovers should not be concerned, according to companies investigating alternative cocoa cultivation methods or developing cocoa alternatives.

Scientists and entrepreneurs are experimenting with ways to produce more cocoa far beyond the tropics, from Northern California to Israel.

California Cultured, a plant cell culture startup, is producing chocolate from cell cultures at a facility in West Sacramento, California, with hopes of beginning selling the product next year. According to Alan Perlstein, the company’s CEO, it places cocoa bean cells in a vat of sugar water, allowing them to reproduce swiftly and mature in a week rather than the six to eight months required for a typical harvest. The procedure also requires less water and labor.

“We see just the demand of chocolate monstrously outstripping what is going to be available,” Perlstein observed. “There’s really no other way that we see that the world could significantly increase the supply of cocoa or still keep it at affordable levels without extensive either environmental degradation or some significant other cost.”

Cocoa trees grow approximately 20 degrees north and south of the equator in areas with warm weather and plenty of rain, such as West Africa and South America. However, climate change is projected to dry out the soil due to increased heat. To fulfill demand, scientists, entrepreneurs, and chocolate lovers are developing new ways to grow cocoa, make it more durable and pest-resistant, and craft chocolatey-tasting cocoa alternatives.

Companies Are Crafting New Ways To Grow Cocoa, And Chocolate Alternatives, To Keep Up With Demand

According to the National Confectioners Association, sales of chocolate in the United States will exceed $25 billion by 2023. Many entrepreneurs believe that demand for cocoa will outpace supply. Companies are considering either increasing supply with cell-based cocoa or providing alternatives produced from items ranging from oats to carbs that have been roasted and flavored to give a chocolaty flavor for chips or filling.

Cocoa prices increased earlier this year due to high demand and crop problems in West Africa caused by plant disease and weather fluctuations. The region produces the vast majority of the world’s cocoa.

“All of this contributes to a potential supply disruption, so it is appealing to these lab-grown or cocoa substitute companies to think of ways to replace that ingredient that we know as chocolatey-flavored,” said Carla D. Martin, executive director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute and a lecturer in African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Martin explained that demand for chocolate in the United States and Europe is driving the innovation. While West and Central Africa produce three-quarters of the world’s cocoa, only 4% is consumed there.

The attempt to grow cocoa inside the United States follows the growth of other items, such as chicken meat, in labs. It also comes as supermarket shelves fill with new food options, which makers of cocoa substitutes say demonstrates that people are willing to try something that looks and tastes like a chocolate chip cookie, even if the chip contains a cocoa substitute.

They also claimed they hope to capitalize on consumers’ growing awareness of where their food originates and what it takes to grow it, including the exploitation of child labor in the chocolate sector.

Planet A Foods in Planegg, Germany, claims that the taste of mass-market chocolate is primarily derived from the fermenting and roasting processes used in its production rather than the cocoa bean. According to Jessica Karch, a company representative, the founders evaluated a variety of ingredients, ranging from olives to seaweed, before settling on a combination of oats and sunflower seeds as the finest-tasting chocolate replacement. It’s called “ChoViva” and may be substituted in baked items, she claimed.

“The idea is not to replace the high quality, 80% dark chocolate, but really to have a lot of different products in the mass market,” Karch told CNN.

While some are developing alternative cocoa sources and substitutes, others are attempting to increase the supply of cocoa, where it grows naturally. Mars, which makes M&Ms and Snickers, has a research lab at the University of California, Davis, that aims to make cocoa plants more resilient, according to Joanna Hwu, the company’s senior director of cocoa plant science. The facility houses a living collection of cocoa trees so scientists can investigate what makes them disease-resistant, assist farmers in producing countries, and ensure a consistent supply of beans.

“We see it as an opportunity, and our responsibility,” Hwu went on.

Companies Are Crafting New Ways To Grow Cocoa, And Chocolate Alternatives, To Keep Up With Demand

In Israel, attempts to increase cocoa supplies are also underway. Hanne Volpin, the co-founder of Celeste Bio, explained that the company grows cocoa bean cells indoors to generate cocoa powder and butter. In a few years, the company hopes to be able to produce cocoa regardless of the effects of climate change and illness – an attempt that has piqued the interest of Mondelez, the creator of Cadbury chocolate.

“We only have a small field, but eventually, we will have a farm of bioreactors,” Volpin told me.

This is comparable to the effort underway at California Cultured, which intends to seek authorization from the United States Food and Drug Administration to label their product chocolate because, according to Perlstein, that is what it is.

It may be referred to as brewery chocolate or local chocolate, but it is still chocolate, he explained, because it is genetically identical despite not being collected from a tree.

“We basically see that we’re growing cocoa — just in a different way,” Perlstein told Reuters.

SOURCE | AP