Americans buy nearly 30,000 tons of chocolate for Valentine’s Day each year. But extreme weather caused by climate change has made it harder to grow the cacao beans needed to make cocoa—the main ingredient in chocolate. A company called California Cultured has found another way to make cocoa: in a lab!
First, scientists remove cells—the smallest units of an organism—from a cacao bean. They place the cells in a vat filled with water and nutrients to grow and multiply. Workers then process this material into cocoa that tastes like it came from naturally grown cacao. “It’s still chocolate but reimagined for a changing planet,” says Tilo Hühn, a scientist from Zurich University in Switzerland who invented the process of culturing chocolate.