Love at First Bite: How Lab-Grown Chocolate Could Save Our Sweet Romance with Cocoa
- Published:Feb 14, 2025
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- Category:Industry Perspective
In honor of Valentine's day, we're serving up a delicious episode of Industry Insights "Love at First Bite: How Lab-Grown Chocolate Could Save Our Sweet Romance with Cocoa."
The future of dessert making is here: lab grown chocolate! This sweet process could help revolutionize the $140 billion chocolate industry with a bioreactor growing actual cocoa cells that will eventually become real chocolate. No cacao farm required. What's could be better? Well, to top it off, these controlled environments allow for optimization of beneficial compounds like polyphenols and antioxidants while reducing unwanted elements, leading to even tastier chocolate.Bioreactors will be the central platform for cellular agriculture in the future and will be making a number of different food products at higher yields, with less water, less inputs, and provide more stable supplies.
By 2026, this technology could move from this single bioreactor to massive production facilities capable of supplementing global chocolate demand with a more sustainable alternative. Needless to say, scaling from this lab setup to industrial-scale bioreactors will become crucial for market impact, making Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) a significant part of the process.Check out this week's episode of Industry Insights and learn how cellular agriculture can produce authentic chocolate flavors by cultivating cocoa cells in controlled environments.