Cell-based chocolate? Oh, why not.

I am not usually a fan of techno foods, but I have to admit: this one might have possibilities.

World’s first cell-based chocolate bar developed with Mondelēz: The first-ever milk chocolate bars made with cell-cultivated cocoa butter have been produced… Read more

Here’s how this works:

Celleste Bio uses cell suspension culture technology to produce cocoa butter in the lab, generating enough chocolate‑grade ingredient from a single cocoa bean to make chocolate bars.  To produce cell‑based cocoa butter, Celleste Bio takes a cocoa bean, opens it and places it in a Petri dish. Once cells begin to grow, they are extracted and fermented with water, sugar and vitamins, allowing biomass to develop. This biomass is then harvested and processed to create cocoa butter.

But if the taste and texture are good enough, this could address the problems currently faced by the chocolate industry in production, supply, human rights, labor, deforestation, and climate-change issues.

But alas, this intriguing technology is still in development.  It can produce a few prototype chocolate bars but is nowhere near scaling up to commercialize.

If it works, I might have to change my mind about techno foods.