Cocoa, Reengineered

When cocoa prices reached a high of $12,000 a tonne in 2024, chocolate companies were hit hard. More than 70% of cocoa is sourced from West and Central Africa, which has felt the impact of unpredictable weather and a new virus affecting cacao trees. While the price per tonne dropped in 2025, the chocolate industry remains focused on controlling raw material costs.

“There is a big challenge when it comes to crop failure,” says Tilo Hühn, professor at the ZHAW School of Life Sciences and Facility Management in Switzerland.

Switzerland, home to some of the world’s leading chocolate brands, including Lindt, Barry Callebaut, and Teuscher, is also home to significant research and development seeking to find cocoa replacements. Barry Callebaut, for example, has partnered with Hühn and his colleagues at ZHAW to investigate cell-based cocoa.

Hühn has research experience with breeding cell cultures to make wine grape plants, and he was part of a team that made the first wine using a bioreactor. He sees similarities between wine and cocoa; terroir influences the sensory attributes of both and both the wine and chocolate categories offer a variety of premium products. When Hühn and his colleagues were looking for another application of cell cultures, cocoa fit the bill.

“We started with cocoa because we thought to produce premium chocolate; there is a market to apply this very special technique,” he says.

They made their first chocolate from plant cell–cultured cocoa in 2015, and Hühn says they were pleased with the results; it tasted just like conventional chocolate. “If you don’t know that it is produced in a bioreactor, you can’t differentiate it,” he says.

He explains that this isn’t surprising because the product the researchers made is nearly identical at the cellular level to cocoa. “We have seen that the composition produced by a cell culture is really similar to production of a plant outside in the environment,” says Hühn.

At the time, however, it was a very niche product, expensive to make, and without a market. But that is now changing. There are several cell-based cocoa startups, including California Cultured and Food Brewer in Switzerland.

The cocoa industry’s goal isn’t to replace cocoa produced using conventional agricultural methods, but it acknowledges the mounting pressures of climate change, Hühn observes. He shares that perspective. His group sees opportunities to create a plant cell–based product that is akin to conventional cocoa and amps up its health benefits. Depending on the culture media used, they can create a cell culture with almost no fat, no acetic acid, and a high amount of various polyphenols, which can then be used to make a chocolate-like product that’s just as enjoyable, he says, noting that he sees potential for valued-added confectionery offerings.

Barry Callebaut’s support for cocoa cell culture technology “is about broadening the spectrum of cocoa-based ingredients available to our customers in a way that complements existing agricultural practices as well as customer demand, innovation, and taste,” a company representative said in an email. “We are preparing for a future where we can offer consumers additional choices beyond cocoa from farms and ensure long-term supply security.”

But there are hurdles to commercializing cell-based cocoa, including the cost of the bioreactors needed for large-scale production. At the moment, most bioreactors are created for the pharmaceutical industry and are very expensive. “The next big step is to develop a bioreactor design that is affordable,” Hühn says.

He also cautions that bigger is not necessarily better because larger bioreactor tanks require more culture media, and culture media is also expensive. His team has filed patents for a plant-based clean label culture media that they hope can be produced inexpensively. Even so, says Hühn, “I think we are far away from an affordable solution.”ft