Env 41: Lab grown chocolate: where sci-fi meets reality?

CHOCOLATE: delicious confectionary, good as a gift, a snack, and a treat.

CHOCOLATE: a versatile ingredient in many recipes, able to  be customised in several ways.

CHOCOLATE: a food in the form of a paste or solid brick made from roasted and ground cacao seeds.

Hmm. Let’s rethink that last one shall we?

Chocolate, the chocolate we all know and love, has traditionally been made with cacao seeds. I bet you’re thinking “well yes…where’s this going…there’s no other way” and until this morning, I would have thought the exact same thing. Until, that is, I came across a set of words I’d never considered using before: Lab Grown Chocolate. Unsure if this was some sort of social media hoax, I researched this so you don’t have to, and discovered that these words are in fact strung together for a reason…

To prelude: lab grown what??

In April 2025, the New Scientist published an environmental article all about the “mouth-watering race to master lab-grown chocolate” as they termed it. The article talks about “Cultured Chocolate” grown in a lab, using cell technology, that could allegedly be superiour to tree-grown chocolate due to the specific health positive chemicals that can be put into it. Whilst I couldn’t read the entire article unfortunately, I have managed to find the company California Cultured, who was featured in it.

California Cultured is an example of a company that is producing chocolate, but in an unconventional way. Motivated by the climate impact of conventional cacao farming, California Cultured uses what they call “Fermentation Farmed Cacao” to produce chocolate. Whilst this doesn’t sound quite as appetising, the process involves selecting cells from the “finest cacao variates” and using fermentation to produce cocoa from it.

To understand this better, let’s take a look at two things: where does fermentation sit in the “traditional” chocolate making process, and why can’t we keep making chocolate the way we normally do?

Firstly: fermentation:

Fermentation is defined in the dictionary as “the breakdown of a substance by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms”. In the early stages of traditional chocolate production, the pectin containing pulp in cacao beans is broken down in a fermentation process over several days.

Pectin: A jelly like polysaccharide present in ripe fruits

Polysaccharide: a carbohydrate formed of bonded sugar molecules

During the fermentation process, a variety of different yeasts and acids break down the cacao beans to produce the chemicals that later become the chocolate flavour, at degrees up to 50ºC. This fermentation process appears quite crucial to the overall chocolate production, with detailed studies carried out to assess the role of both chemicals and fermentation time in the final product quality.

Traditionally, this is done using agricultural processes, where cacao beans are laid in banana leaf beds for up to two weeks. This allows heat to become trapped in the leaf bed, and promotes the yeasts and insects to speed the process, allowing for fermentation to occur.

Why might traditional methods be an issue?

Fermentation, being a perfectly natural process that occurs in nature, might not seem like such an issue to do when looked at from afar. However, as we have a wont to do, humans have increased the demand for fermented cacao beans to an extent that the process may be more than our planet (and us) can handle.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Sub-Regional Hub for West and Central Africa surmises the issue succinctly: “the crumbling empire of chocolate“.

Before fermentation can even occur, the cacao beans need to be grown, and this requires a warm and humid climate, and grows slowly, taking a year for the equivalent of two chocolate bars of cocoa to be grown. Comparing this to demand, you don’t even need me to put numbers against this to understand that one single tree is going to struggle a lot with chocolate demand.

(for those of you who would rather like the numbers, or rather, for those of you who will indulge in me wanting to use the numbers: it would take around 130, 000 cocoa trees to produce enough chocolate for the population of America to eat in valentines week alone, according to the UNDP in 2025.)

Through this, we can see that our dedicated love of chocolate is perhaps too intense for the planet to sustain, which gives logical reasoning to the thought behind lab grown chocolate. One can see the need to develop another way to make chocolate that isn’t going to strip our fields bare and leave them full of spent husks of cacao plants, but how does lab grown chocolate compare, and does it address some of the ‘traditional chocolate’ problems?

Health & Safety:

First off, what’s the health & safety risk to traditional chocolate? According to CR (Consumerreports.org), chocolate has been found to contain traces of Cadmium and Lead, which are heavy metals linked to health issues in humans. The organisation tested 28 different chocolate bars in 2022, (methodology here) to measure for presence of Arsenic, Cadmium, Lead, and Mercury, and according to their output report (full article here) found Cadmium and Lead in all samples.

In fact, a year later, the organisation went a step further and tested 48 chocolate products, including chocolate chips, bars, brownie mix, and hot chocolate, again across multiple brands and found – once again – that every product had traces of Lead and Cadmium; moreover, 16 of the products were above the organisations threshold of concern.

According to Whitakers, lab grown chocolate is being developed with health and safety in mind, and has the benefit of being monitored closely at every stage, not requiring the addition of chemicals that agriculture might need such as pesticides, or contamination due to weather bringing across chemicals from nearby.

Social & Environmental Impact:

An article published by The Week summarises some of the key issues with ‘Traditional Chocolate’ practices rather concisely:

The leading producer of chocolate is the Ivory Coast, Africa, which sees over 2 million tonnes of chocolate produced a year. I’ve already mentioned that it takes a lot of cocoa to make just one bar, and it’s been reported that roughly 70% of illegal deforestation in West Africa is triggered to create space for cocoa. The Ivory Coast reportedly loses an area of forest equal to the size of New York, every year.

Lab grown chocolate therefore has the potential to address some of these issues no? With less demand for cocoa at every stage, there is less pressure on farmers, therefore less deforestation, and hopefully better treatment of people in various stages of the production process. At least, in theory.

However, as Whitakers prove in their debate on the ethics of a lab process, it’s not quite that simple. They report that as many as 6 million farmers rely on cocoa for income, and so removing this will have significant effects on their livelihoods. Furthermore, even if you did find a way to balance this out, the labs themselves require their own energy using processes- not to mention the impact of building them in the first place.

There is also the key balance I’m not certain we know how to strike yet: if lab grown chocolate is designed to reduce the need for agriculturally grown cocoa, then where will the labs find their cocoa samples to start the fermentation process? Clearly some cocoa will need to be grown, but how much, how sustainably, and how long before we find a good balance?

However, by the lengths and twists of this article alone, you can see there are so many avenues to go down in this debate: the ethics, the social impact, the environmental impact, health and safety, practical aspects; the list could go on and I have attempted to string some of those into a fairly coherent research piece here, but perhaps I’ll revisit this too, and dive into some of the other aspects I haven’t gone into much depth on. I will however, leave the article with one final tangent, perhaps the most curious one…

So when could you expect to eat lab grown chocolate?

According to a BBC article from March 2025, the Food Standards Agency was looking into speeding the approval process required to use lab grown chocolate. The article states that there is in fact already lab grown food on the market: at the time of publication, lab grown dog food.

At the time, there were also significant debates on whether the UK was even ready for this, relating to regulation and health and safety and costing, with one critic raising that those involved in pushing the Food Standard Agency decision were the ones best placed to benefit from the outcome, leading to a response I shall quote from Lord Vallance:

Whatever the debate, the BBC stated that within two years (so next year as I write), lab grown meat, dairy and sugar could be sold in the UK. So keep your eyes peeled, and let me know if you spot some!