According to our AI overlords, Americans buy approximately 58 million pounds of chocolate each Valentine's Day. That amounts to billions of dollars in chocolate sales. But as we've reported in the past, nearly two-thirds of the world's cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, where forests are being cleared for farming and beans are often harvested by children or grossly underpaid adults. Since our appetite for cacao shows no signs of diminishing, some entrepreneurs are looking for alternatives.
A handful of food tech companies have thrown their weight behind lab-grown chocolate aka cell-cultured chocolate. However you might feel about food grown in a lab, the idea of chocolate being created in a petri dish is intriguing.
Gabriela Glueck, Good Food's Julia Child reporting fellow, visited California Cultured to find out how lab-grown chocolate is made, how it tastes, and if it's coming for your Snickers bar anytime soon. Then, she and Evan Kleiman sat down to taste it.
Gabriela Glueck: California Cultured is headquartered in Sacramento. Its lab is tucked away in a nondescript warehouse park. All gray, no green. It's hard to imagine they're growing anything here, let alone a tropical plant like cacao. I met Alan Perlstein, the company's founder, in a cafe right next to the lab. He was hard to miss. California Cultured hat. California Cultured shirt. Alan's a food tech guy at heart, and got his start working on cell culture, aka lab-grown meat, over 15 years ago. Since then, he's worked in all sorts of cell-based food labs. For him, the chocolate problem was like a nail and cell culture, a hammer.
Alan Perlstein: I sort of started cobbling together these processes and technologies to see, is this actually possible? Can you make real chocolate? Can you do it at a decent price? Can you do it at scale? And that led to, sort of the formation of California Cultured.
Alan Perlstein got his start working in cell-based food labs before questioning whether he could produce real chocolate at a decent price. Photo by Gracie Malley/California Cultured.
Gabriela Glueck: In the world of lab grown meat, entrepreneurs have been asking these same questions for years. But according to Alan, growing chocolate in a lab is more straightforward than growing meat. After chatting in the coffee shop, we headed over to the lab, and Alan introduced me to California Cultured's Head of Strategy and Products.
Alan Perlstein: All right, Steve, you're up.
Gabriela Glueck: Steve Sterns is a former chef. He used to work at the famed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. After years spent in the kitchen, he transitioned to food science. Steve was drawn to California Cultured for the company's emphasis on sustainability and the opportunity to use science in pursuit of flavor. Plus, he loves the complexity of chocolate.
Steven Stearns: Thousands of different molecules play into the final flavor profile of a chocolate.
Gabriela Glueck: The smallest of adjustments can unlock a new note. And one degree of difference in temperature can mark a flavor shift. In a lab, you can control all of that.
Steven Stearns: I've never given an audio lab tour before.
Gabriela Glueck: When you walk in, the first thing you notice is the humming of lab equipment. The whole space is about half the size of a basketball court. The company is in the middle of a renovation, so right now, things are a bit cramped. There's a handful of people working on their laptops and a couple technicians, pipettes in hand, hunched over an assortment of lab stations. Like traditional chocolate, lab chocolate starts with a cacao pod. These pods are shaped like a football and can come in a variety of colors, green, orange, purple. California Cultured needs just a single pod to grow a theoretically infinite amount of chocolate, and they source their pods from around the world.
Like traditional chocolate, lab chocolate starts with a cacao pod. Photo by Gracie Malley/California Cultured.
Steven Stearns: We might have some rare varieties that are hard to grow on the farm, that can be easier to grow in biomanufacturing. You can think of your criollos for cocoa, which are really difficult to grow.
Gabriela Glueck: Criollo cacao is one of the world's most prized and rare varieties. It was cultivated by the Maya and Aztec. After choosing a nice variety, a healthy pod with a good flavor profile, technicians cut the pods in half, revealing the cacao beans. Then they extract cell material from the beans. Since they are inventing this technology, some of their equipment is improvised. The cells, for instance, are stored in a repurposed pizza dough fridge.
Steven Stearns: It's basically used to proof dough, if you're making sourdough or something. It was kind of perfect to store our cells, because plant cells love this specific temperature and humidity that goes on in here.
Gabriela Glueck: When they're ready to kick start the culture, technicians cut off a little clump of cells and mix in a nutrient broth, some water, sugar, and plant hormones. The liquid gets swirled around for a few days, and then it's time to ferment.
Steven Stearns: Just gonna grab a flashlight really quick.
Gabriela Glueck: The fermentation step takes place inside of a black fabric pop-up tent. Steve told me that the cells seem to do best in the dark.
Steven Stearns: I think a picture to paint would be if you've ever seen a home brewing kit and you've seen these fermenters that are just built out of either plastic or glass that people make beer in. It's literally what we're doing with these plant cells.
Here the texture of the chocolate is checked. Photo by Gracie Malley/California Cultured.
Gabriela Glueck: The whole setup is kind of DIY looking. And I notice it says "Goose" and "Whiskeytown."
Steven Stearns: Yeah, we nickname all of our fermenters.
Gabriela Glueck: After three to four days in the fermenter, the cocoa cells are ready to be harvested and dried. At this point, they look like a pile of crushed up bran flakes. These brownish flakes then get the same treatment as traditional cocoa beans — drying, roasting, grinding. But this all happens much faster.
It takes five years for a cacao tree to produce fruit. California Cultured can turn their bean cells around in roughly a week. And the lab grown chocolate is lead free, cadmium free, deforestation free, child labor free, you name it. They've even figured out how to up flavanol content. That's the ultra-healthy compound most notably found in dark chocolate. But the question I'm sure you're all asking: How does it taste?
Steven Stearns: So we're trying a dark chocolate, which is made from a variety of Trinitario cocoa beans, which is from Trinidad and Tobago. But they're grown here in California, in our lab. This is a 70% dark chocolate.
Gabriela Glueck: Steve handed me a small vacuum-sealed bag. Inside were three pieces of lab grown chocolate shaped like coffee beans. He gave me one and took another for himself.
Steven Stearns: Getting a lot of nice even melting going on from a nice, well tempered chocolate. Up front, you get a lot of earthy, grassy notes. Then, as it melts onto the back of your palate, you get a lot of fruit forward notes. A lot of dark cherry and a little bit of raisin going on. And then you get a nice lingering kind of caramel aftertone when it goes down your throat. It's quite pleasant and creamy, too. Cheers.
After three to four days in the fermenter, the cocoa cells are ready to be harvested and dried. Photo by Gracie Malley/California Cultured.
Gabriela Glueck: Raisin is really the right word. It's interesting. The snap wasn't as aggressive as it might be if you were going for a dark chocolate bar and you really have that shattering bite. It did kind of just sink your teeth into it. It was good. Fruit forward chocolate isn't my favorite, but they've got a more standard milk chocolate too.
Steven Stearns: We've given out samples to about 20,000 people at this point. The most common thing is, "Oh, it's chocolate."
Gabriela Glueck: And that's the point. It's not roasted carob disguised as chocolate. It is chocolate. The hope is that if you put it in a Snickers bar, no one would notice. Plus that's where they'd be able to pack the biggest sustainability punch. The huge need for commodity chocolate, like the kind found in your Halloween candy bowl, is a major reason for deforestation and human rights abuses.
Steven Stearns: There's a growing gap in the supply and demand in the cocoa industry right now, where the amount of chocolate that is available on the planet is not enough to supply the masses with chocolate.
"Chocolate grown in California seems like a fairytale," says Steven Stearns. But maybe not anymore. Photo by Gracie Malley/California Cultured.
Gabriela Glueck: After a series of low-yield years, cocoa prices have soared. From January 2024 to January 2025, the price per metric ton nearly tripled. If California Cultured can produce enough chocolate at the right price, they're in business, but they can't make enough just yet. So, instead, they've opted for smaller scale options. That's CEO Alan Perlstein's game plan.
Alan Perlstein: The idea is we could first establish trust with consumers, showcasing our ingredients, then working on scaling up this technology, bringing prices down low enough that we could eventually start producing at enough volumes to supply a large user of chocolate, like for M&Ms or Snickers or something else.
Gabriela Glueck: They're collaborating with Japanese Meiji chocolates, known for making cookie chocolate snacks like Hello Panda and Meiji Mushroom. California Cultured's first products are scheduled to launch towards the end of 2025 or early 2026 Alan and Steve seem confident that they can grow their company into a chocolate giant. Steve even thinks the idea of "lab-grown in California chocolate" can be appealing.
Steven Stearns: Chocolate grown in California seems like a fairytale. The plant is just not suitable to grow here. And so it is cool to think that this might be the only type of chocolate that's ever grown in California.
Gabriela Glueck: The question is, would you eat it?
Evan Kleiman: Would I eat it? Well, I'm gonna eat it. So here we go. I have this giant Fed-Ex box [that] arrived at my house. I'm like, "What is it? What is in here?" I got two of these packages, like, what you described. I'm just gonna open one. It smells like chocolate. So Gabi, did you feel weird when you first were about to take a bite, or did you just pop it in your mouth without thinking? I don't know if somebody of my generation has a different relationship to the "ick factor" than a younger person like yourself?
Gabriela Glueck: Yeah, I think that generational ick difference is a good theory. A lot of the younger people I talked to, kind of people my age, were saying they would be really excited to try the chocolate and just more curious to see what it tasted like. So I think that's definitely a possibility. I had a slight ick but more so was just curious. Did this actually taste like chocolate? Could I tell a difference?
Lab grown chocolate is free of lead, cadmium, deforestation, and child labor. Photo by Gracie Malley/California Cultured.
Evan Kleiman: It’s unbelievably aromatic, and as I'm holding it, it's starting to melt, so I'm gonna pop it in my mouth. Iit has something about, like a bean to bar type of chocolate where there are a lot of different notes. I definitely taste the raisin and there's a brightness, like an acidic element that comes into play. Mouthfeel, which I think is really, really, really important in chocolate, I think it's one of the main reasons why we love it, not just the flavor is really good, hmm, so interesting.
Gabriela Glueck: Are you still feeling some kind of ick?
Evan Kleiman: It's really interesting because I've tasted lab meat. I mean, not Impossible Burger, but actually, a piece of faux chicken, and that, I have to say, really creeped me out. This, less so. I think it's because it's chocolate. I have to say, it's a very smart thing to do, because the overwhelmingly positive nature of our interaction with chocolate is easily overriding the ick.
Gabriela Glueck: Yeah, I kind of had the same experience. When you eat it, you can't help but associate it with all your past memories of eating a chocolate bar or a piece of chocolate and all those positive feelings. Your brain kind of puts it in the same category, because it really is.
Evan Kleiman: Yeah, it's chocolate. So tell me, if we zoom out and look at the big picture here, what do you think the possibility is of this taking off? I'm thinking about all the hype around Impossible and Beyond Meat, which are different from cultured meats, but regardless, offer a meat alternative. Neither of those products seem to have made much of a dent in the meat market and sales seem to have tapered off from their launch.
Gabriela Glueck: Yeah, I was kind of curious about that question as well, so I ended up talking with a chocolate expert. His name is Howard-Yana Shapiro. He spent quite a bit of time. He's the retired Chief Agriculture Officer at Mars, a plant scientist and geneticist. I kind of posed that same question to him. He has this long history with chocolate production, and he, while excited about the science experiment, nature of lab-grown chocolate, was a realist. He basically said to me, "Look, this isn't going to replace conventional chocolate as we know it." Even thinking about something like Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods, I found this study from the Good Food Institute (no affiliation with our show), and this was in 2023. They found that plant-based meat and seafood accounted for just under 1% of retail meat sales. So Howard was saying, "Look, if this gets to 10% in my life, that would be amazing."
Evan Kleiman: Did you talk to any cacao farmers? I wonder what they think.
Gabriela Glueck: Yeah, I did. I ended up talking with Veronique Mbida. She is the founder of Bantu Chocolate. It's a bean-to-bar operation, and they harvest beans from her mom's farm in Cameroon. I was interested in her take and she said, when she first heard about lab-grown chocolate, her initial reaction was fear, a little bit. Is this going to take away jobs from farmers? Is this something that's going to end up dominating the industry? But her conclusion, I thought, was really interesting. She said, "Look, I think there are always going to be people who want the real thing, and that's what's going to keep this industry going and traditional cacao farming going." I thought that idea of the real thing was really interesting.
Evan Kleiman: Yeah, I mean, there's always going to be those of us who want locally made bean-to-bar chocolate, and really want to celebrate the artisanal nature of the whole process.
Gabriela Glueck: I think an interesting kind of pushback I got throughout this story was people saying there is some kind of specialty, premium nature about lab-grown. So maybe it does have that kind of appeal to a premium market. That story of "made in the lab in Sacramento" that could be appealing.
Evan Kleiman: To whom?
Gabriela Glueck: To so many young people I talked to when I told them about this story, people living in California, they reacted to it as if I was talking about some kind of local coffee roaster.
Evan Kleiman: Well, I have to say that is a generational gulf. Thank you so much for pursuing this story.
Gabriela Glueck: Of course, very interesting. I'm glad I got to try them.
More Good Food stories about chocolate
- How to grow cacao trees and make your own chocolate from the pods
- Making a modern chocolate bar from rare cacao grown deep in the Amazon
- The chocolate bar that's an edible civics lesson
- How is our chocolate addiction killing the environment?
- Eating chocolate with your ears
Music thanks in part to Blue Dot Sessions.