Cocoa Without Compromise: California Cultured Scales Biotech Chocolate Breakthrough

Courtesy: California Cultured

In a breakthrough that could reshape the $100 billion global chocolate industry, California Cultured has successfully scaled up its cell-cultured cocoa production from laboratory experiments to precision-controlled, food-grade biomanufacturing. The transition, executed in partnership with Pow.Bio’s AI-enabled fermentation facility in Alameda, California, marks a pivotal step in bringing sustainable, biotech-powered chocolate to market.

The announcement puts California Cultured at the forefront of a growing wave of startups using biotechnology—not just food science—to redesign core agricultural commodities. While alternative proteins have captured most headlines, a quieter but equally urgent movement is emerging: decoupling the world’s most resource-intensive, climate-vulnerable crops—like cocoa, coffee, and tea—from land, labor, and climate constraints.

Working inside Pow.Bio’s 25,000-square-foot facility—equipped with continuous fermentation chambers, clean room infrastructure, and real-time AI-driven process control—California Cultured optimized key variables including oxygen transfer, pH stability, and nutrient delivery. The result: consistent production of high-value cocoa metabolites such as flavonoids and lipids, essential to chocolate’s flavor and texture. This milestone not only reduces production costs but also validates the technical and economic feasibility of industrial-scale, cell-grown cocoa.

“Our goal isn’t to replace chocolate—it’s to future-proof it,” said a spokesperson from California Cultured. “We’re cultivating the same cocoa cells that make chocolate what it is, just without the deforestation, monoculture, and supply chain risk.”

The company is now preparing for downstream processing, sensory trials, and eventual commercialization. If successful, it could offer manufacturers a reliable, ethical source of cocoa that isn’t tied to tropical regions increasingly threatened by climate change.

This milestone places California Cultured among a new class of biotech innovators working to disrupt commodity crops through cellular agriculture. In Israel, Celleste Bio and Kokomodo are also engineering cocoa via cell cultivation. In Switzerland, Food Brewer is working on cocoa ingredients using microbial biosynthesis. And on the caffeine front, companies like Atomo Coffee, and Stem are rethinking coffee, growing flavor and caffeine compounds without a single bean. Japan and South Korea are exploring similar approaches to tea, using plant cell culture to grow bioactive compounds in controlled environments.

The urgency is clear: traditional commodity crops like cocoa, coffee, and tea face rising climate instability, exploitative labor dynamics, and tightening regulations around deforestation-linked imports. For cocoa in particular, the EU’s new deforestation law is set to reshape global supply chains—and could squeeze smallholder farmers who lack the tools to prove traceability. Biotech offers a way to diversify sourcing, ensure quality, and drastically cut environmental impact.

“California Cultured’s scale-up marks a defining moment in the evolution of food tech,” said Mitchell Scott, CEO of CULT Food Science, a backer of the company. “This is the kind of science-driven innovation that moves us from niche proof-of-concept to viable global solution.”

As the company prepares for commercial rollout, the broader implications come into focus. If cell-based cocoa can deliver on cost, flavor, and scalability, it won’t just be an alternative—it will be a strategic necessity in an industry scrambling to meet climate and consumer demands.

California Cultured’s achievement is not just about chocolate. It’s about building a blueprint for how we might grow the ingredients of the future—not on plantations, but in precision-controlled tanks, where flavor, ethics, and resilience are engineered from the cell up.