By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
Chocolate, the sweet treat that is loved in food, drinks or enjoyed on its own, is a firm favorite worldwide.
Global market data company Innova says in 2023, nearly two-thirds of consumers worldwide bought some form of chocolate. And according to international consumer insights firm Statista, the chocolate market is today worth $133 billion – and is expected to grow every year by close to five percent.
But chocolate comes at a price that goes beyond what we pay in the shops. The industry has a heavy impact on the environment, and Israeli startup Celleste Bio is determined to change that with its lab-cultivated cocoa beans.
The World Wildlife Fund says that farmers who grow the cocoa beans – 70 percent of whom are in the West African countries of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon – tend to clear tropical forests to plant new cocoa trees, rather than reusing the same land. Because of this, West Africa is experiencing massive deforestation.
But the environmental toll does not end there. Two other common ingredients in chocolate – soy and palm oil – are also major causes of deforestation around the world.
And while some chocolate manufacturers, such as Germany’s Ritter Sport and Tony’s Chocolonely of the Netherlands, do have sustainable practices, this has yet to take hold in the industry as a whole.
But Celleste Bio says it has the answer – cultivating cocoa in the lab, from cocoa beans, that is indistinguishable from farmed cocoa.
“We’re the real thing, because we’ve found a way to produce 100 percent natural cocoa without all the limitations and the problems that this broken supply chain has,” Celleste CEO Michal Beressi Golomb tells NoCamels.
The lab-cultivated cocoa is grown from just a couple of actual beans, which can be repeatedly reproduced, and without, Beressi Golomb says, “having to cut a single tree again.”
The Misgav-based company’s unique method uses cell culture technology to create the cocoa beans, and combines it with AI modeling to create the optimal growing conditions. These bean cells are then used to make the cocoa butter needed to manufacture chocolate, which has the identical chemical profile to the original.
“We are the first in the world to have been able to produce chocolate-grade cocoa butter,” Beressi Golomb says. “We’re really excited about it.”
She explains that the company takes the cells from one or two cocoa beans and places them in a liquid culture in a bioreactor. The cells rapidly multiply and are harvested to obtain the butter.
It takes just seven days for the bean cells to mature in the bioreactor so that the butter can be harvested. Celleste also produces cocoa powder from the remainder of the beans once the butter is extracted.
And no stage of the process involves genetic modification, a fact Beressi Golomb makes sure to stress.
The unique environment, according to Beressi Golomb, makes the cocoa bean cells think that they are growing in a pod on a tree.
“We’re using the bioreactor as our forest,” she says.
This means that the bean cells can be grown anywhere in the world, regardless of climate, and not just in the traditional hot countries around the equator.
“They just grow over and over again, it’s a continuous cycle,” she says. “We don’t need more trees.”
Beressi Golomb points out that the company’s method also eradicates high-quality beans’ vulnerability to pests and disease, a sensitivity that devastated the Brazilian cocoa bean industry – downgrading it from the world’s second-largest cocoa producer 40 years ago to just the seventh-largest today.
She warns that West African cocoa farmers are now facing a similar situation, making a new solution all the more urgent.
Celleste Bio was established in late 2022, two years after its founders began working on a way to make chocolate healthier. But, Beressi Golomb says, with support of Israeli agritech and foodtech incubator Trendlines, they soon pivoted to cultivating cocoa for the industry.
The company soon caught the interest of American multinational Mondelez, one of the largest food companies in the world, whose portfolio includes global chocolate brands such as Cadbury, Milka, Côte d’Or and Fry’s. And today the food giant is Celleste’s strategic investor.
“They’re a great partner and they’re very excited about it,” says Beressi Golomb.
Others are working on similar solutions, she says, primarily companies in the US, Switzerland and Israel, but they are all focused on cocoa powder and none have been able to produce cocoa butter.
Even so, she qualifies, with such a huge market for both cocoa butter and cocoa powder, each worth billions of dollars, there is room for more than one company.
Celleste has already produced its proof of concept in the form of its chocolate-grade cocoa butter, and is now focusing on upscaling its process, with the objectives of both creating a 50,000 liter bioreactor (it is currently aiming for a 1,000 liter bioreactor within a year) and being ready for market in 2027.
“We’re here to save the chocolate industry,” says Beressi Golomb, “and to ensure that everybody can eat chocolate and feel good about it.”
