Coffee and cocoa prices have soared while issues like child labor, deforestation, and climate change have persisted. California Cultured is a Sacramento-based startup working on a novel solution for the coffee and cocoa industries.
“We are still starting with basically a little living bean… we put it in a liquid environment, and we trick the bean over thousands of passages to grow the way that we want. We’re directly growing the tissue that gets turned into chocolate,” said Alan Perlstein the California Cultured founder and CEO.
A cultured line can be grown in six months but can take up to three years. Once the cultured line is ready to refine into cocoa or coffee, it only takes about a week. Perlstein also discusses the ability to hone the cultured line to match a client’s specific flavor, smell, and texture.
“If a company wants to have an X hundreds of thousands of tons, they will tell us, ‘We want it to taste like this, to smell like that,'” Perlstein said. “We put in the right cell line, and within a couple of days later, we’re able to deliver a very large amount of cocoa,” he explained. California Cultured claimes that 80% of the people who taste their products cannot tell they were grown in a laboratory.
Here is the official California Cultured website.
