Various techniques are employed by the chocolate industry in order to cope with the increase in the price of cocoa. Among other things, with the help of technology and artificial intelligence, cocoa beans are made in the laboratory with cell culture. Chocolate is still made from fava beans and other alternative ways, according to CNN.

In particular, the chocolate industry is going through a crisis. Cocoa prices have doubled since the start of the year as crops in West Africa, which produces 80% of the world’s cocoa, have been hit by droughts exacerbated by climate change. As a result, processing plants in countries such as Ghana and Ivory Coast stopped or reduced production, while major manufacturers raised prices and lowered sales estimates.

This crisis in the cocoa industry comes to add to a series of problems. Cocoa is one of the main drivers of illegal deforestation and there is evidence of child labor and slavery on cocoa farms in Africa and Brazil. Cultivating cocoa trees also requires a lot of water, yet only the seeds of the fruit are harvested.

One way to deal with these problems is to make chocolate without cocoa beans, the seed of the cocoa tree. Cocoa-free chocolate is already available, but scientists around the world are looking for new ways to make it greener and healthier, using new techniques and ingredients.

Chocolate

Greener Alternatives – Chocolate made from fava beans

Finding the right ingredients, however, can take time. “Between our first prototype and the current formula, we’ve had 500 iterations and nothing from that original product has survived to commercial,” said Max Marquart of the German company Planet A Foods, which makes ChoViva, a sunflower-seed chocolate alternative and oats, as well as grape seeds, shea butter and sugar.

Planet A only supplies other manufacturers, including Swiss chocolate maker Lindt, and ChoViva is used as an ingredient in over a dozen products sold in Germany. It also produces cocoa powder and cocoa butter substitutes. “The powder is made with a fermentation-like process, while for the butter side we use a process similar to brewing beer, using specific strains of yeast,” Marquart said.

It describes the production process as “short and sustainable”, as the ingredients are sourced close to the production facilities in the Czech Republic. Currently, ChoViva is mainly used in chocolate snacks and cereals, rather than making chocolate bars. “We’re not targeting your Cadbury Milk or your plain chocolate bars, that’s not our target,” Marquart said.

Price, he added, is an important consideration when it comes to getting people to switch to cocoa-free chocolate. “There’s no point in trying to change people’s behavior — that wouldn’t work. You want to reach them by making it very easy for them: no change in taste, no change in price, but at the same time they get more sustainability, for free.”

Other companies have different recipes. “Instead of cocoa beans, we use fava beans sourced from farms across the UK and Europe and then ferment them in a similar way that cocoa farmers ferment their cocoa beans,” said Ross Newton, CEO of Nukoko. of a UK-based startup. which it aims to launch in its home market next year.

“We believe we are very close to a traditional Ghanaian cocoa flavor profile. Things like texture and mouthfeel are a little easier to achieve because the fats and sugars help. Flavor matching is a more difficult point, but because our process is so similar to actual cacao fermentation, we can come closer than anyone else to actually matching real cacao flavor,” Newton added.

Chocolate

Cocoa in the lab with the help of artificial intelligence for cell culture

A different approach comes from cell farming, in which cocoa beans are grown in a lab starting from a small sample of the real thing. “We take one to two cocoa beans and put them in cell culture, giving it sugar, vitamins and water,” said Michal Beressi Golomb, CEO of Celleste Bio, an Israeli startup. “The cells then multiply until we have a large biomass. We collect the cocoa butter and we are left with the cocoa powder.”

The company built its first prototype late last year, after eight months of work. “We have succeeded in extracting chocolate-quality cocoa butter, and we are the first in the world to do so using cell culture technology. It has the same chemical profile as traditional cocoa butter. It can be a drop replacement in the chocolate production process.”

However, the cost of making cocoa butter this way is still prohibitively high, and there are regulatory hurdles to overcome before the product can be sold. “That’s the goal for 2027, cost parity,” Beressi Golomb said. On approval, he said, “We will start with the US, which has a faster regulatory process. Europe and the UK have a backlog of applications.”

Compared to traditional cocoa bean production, growing it in a lab allows for greater control over the final product, according to Beressi Golomb. “We combine biotechnology, agrotechnology and artificial intelligence to create optimal growth conditions for cells. We use computational modeling systems that can lead to a variety of products in the future, such as a higher melting point with cocoa butter so that chocolate can be sold in warmer climates, or a less bitter cocoa powder to put less sugar in the product.”

To traditionally produce two tons of cocoa butter, Beressi Golomb said, four tons of cocoa beans are required, using 2,000 trees and more than 100,000 square feet (9,290 square meters) of land. The same amount can be produced in a laboratory using a 1,000-liter bioreactor with a footprint of about 15 square feet. “We’ll never have to cut down a single tree again (to make room for cocoa plantations) – that’s a huge impact.”