The price of cocoa is soaring- could lab-grown chocolate be the answer?

The price of cocoa has soared, as deforestation and climate change make it more difficult for chocolate producers to get their hands on the precious beans. 

Sacramento-based startup California Cultured is hoping it has found a solution to the industry’s supply issue. 

“We are still starting with basically a little living bean. So, instead of planting it, we put it in a liquid environment, and we trick the bean over thousands of passages to grow the way that we want,” said Alan Perlstein, California Cultured’s founder and CEO, in an interview with CNBC Tech: The Edge. 

“We’re directly growing the tissue that gets turned into chocolate,” he added. 

It takes a minimum of six months and up to three years to grow a cultured cell line. When the cell line is ready, finished cocoa and coffee can be made in about a week. 

“If a company wants to have an X hundreds of thousands of tons, they will tell us, ‘We want it to taste like this, to smell like that,’” Perlstein said.

“We put in the right cell line, and within a couple of days later, we’re able to deliver a very large amount of cocoa,” he explained. 

California Cultured claimed 80% of the people who taste its products cannot tell they were grown in a laboratory. 

During CNBC’s visit to the company’s labs, we had our own chocolate tasting with satisfactory results. 

California Cultured aims to co-brand its chocolate products with chocolate companies. One of the first collaborations will be with Japanese group Meiji, owner of the popular Hello Panda snacks and one of California Cultured’s investors. 

The targeted market launch date is sometime in 2025 or 2026. First, the Sacramento business would need to obtain approval from regulators and scale up production.