A new recipe for indulgence

June 23, 2025

What if your favorite chocolate didn’t require cocoa beans and your coffee was locally produced? As climate disruption, price hikes and ethical concerns hit two of our most beloved indulgences, scientists are reimagining how we produce them – using microbes, not monocultures. The goal: preserve the flavor and properties of coffee and chocolate while minimizing carbon emissions and improving food resilience.

Who hasn’t spent a few extra minutes in the chocolate and coffee aisles lately? Higher prices have many of us asking if we should add these favorites to our shopping carts. And many wonder how long the price hikes – and occasional supply issues – will last. From climate change to rising demand, there are several reasons behind the increased prices and shortages, but the bigger question is: Can anything be done about it?

Closing the gap to more sustainable food production

The classic farm to fork supply chain is long. It also creates a lot of harmful carbon emissions, requires expensive inputs and depends on rainfall and steady temperatures, factors that are becoming increasingly erratic.

Food scientists are perfecting new production methods, based on well-known principles, that provide shortcuts to similar or even bioidentical foods compared to those coming from traditional agricultural practices. For example, precision fermentation uses microorganisms (like yeast or bacteria) to make specific ingredients – such as proteins, enzymes or vitamins – in a clean, efficient way. “The process is similar to brewing beer, but instead of making alcohol, we program the yeast or other microorganism to make something more specific, like milk proteins, egg white proteins, insulin or even cocoa components,” explains Morten Holm Christensen, Application Manager for Biotechnology at GEA. The microorganisms grow in tanks, or fermenters, producing the desired ingredient which is then collected and purified.

Another food production shortcut is cell cultivation. This involves taking a tiny cell of an animal or plant, adding it to a nutrient-rich mixture (basically food for the cells) which is placed in a warm environment where the cells can grow and multiply – just like they would inside an animal’s body or in a plant sown in soil. In a short time, there is enough biomass to harvest and turn into a biologically identical product, whether that’s chicken meat, milk or coffee. “Conversion efficiency is much greater with both of these processes because they circumvent long animal or plant rearing schedules, along with most of the inputs required along the way, like feed, water, fertilizer and pesticides,” says Christensen.

Coffee and chocolate: higher price, higher risk

From your morning latte to your favorite dark chocolate, food prices have been volatile. Both cocoa and coffee depend on raw materials that grow in limited geographies with very specific weather conditions. Extreme weather, crop disease and land-use conflict have led to shortages of coffee beans and cocoa, driving up prices while demand for both continues to grow.

Did you know?

Chocolate without cacao beans

Interestingly, neither chocolate nor coffee taste the same in their raw form as they do in end products. That means the flavors or mouthfeel that consumers enjoy are not solely dependent on the beans they are traditionally made from; they can be imitated using other ingredients and processing methods.

One method to create cocoa-free chocolate is to use agricultural side streams. For example, a German company leverages remnants from sunflower oil production, using a yeast to precisely ferment its chocolate. The result mimics the “snap”, taste and mouthfeel of conventional chocolate. Already available to producers, this ingredient, along with a cocoa butter alternative, are in use in diverse products in Europe and the UK and produce up to 90 percent fewer carbon emissions than conventional products. Similarly, a Singapore-based startup employs fermentation to turn soy pulp left over from tofu production into cocoa-free chocolate. It hopes to achieve commercialization in 2025 for the B2B market.

In parallel, several companies are growing real cocoa cells in bioreactors to make bioidentical products like cocoa powder and cocoa fat; these ingredients are then sold to food manufacturers. In the U.S., a California-based biotech company produces chocolate using extracted cacao plant cells. They are cultivated in fermentation tanks under conditions mimicking the rainforests where cacao thrives. After three to four days, the cells are harvested, fermented and roasted – the same final steps in traditional cocoa production. Commercialization, after U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval, is expected in 2026.

Bean-free coffee

Like chocolate, the path to alternative coffee includes both precision fermentation and cell-based approaches. For example, the same Singapore startup uses precision fermentation to create bean-free coffee from upcycled bread, soy pulp and spent barley grains. The product is already available to retail customers.

In Israel, a biotech venture capital has developed a cell cultivation method using cells extracted from coffee plants that can produce the coffee equivalent of 1000 trees in just three weeks – a process that would normally take years. The cells are added to a liquid medium with nutrients which help the cells grow efficiently. The resulting biomass is dried and gently roasted – and not surprisingly, looks and tastes like traditional ground coffee, including the caffeine. The next step for this company is to seek regulatory approvals. A Zurich-based startup actually sources its coffee cells from Arabica plants grown in a nearby greenhouse, creating the potential for a 100 percent locally made product.

Today, only a handful of coffee and cocoa varieties are produced for the mass market. Cell cultivation could enable the production of more niche varieties in smaller quantities, giving consumers greater variety in their choice of products.

Scaling up cellular agriculture production

Thanks to better methods for gene coding and developing robust cell lines, the “how” of making bean-free cocoa and coffee, sweet proteins – and many other new foods – is already established. The next step is to secure regulatory approvals and scale up production. This is a critical steppingstone if we want to supplement the output from traditional farming which is “at capacity” from an environmental standpoint.

To shorten the time between lab breakthrough and mass-market products, producers must overcome cost, volume and quality barriers. This requires equipment that runs efficiently, around the clock and under food-grade sanitary conditions. “Companies like GEA, with its deep food processing and cellular agriculture expertise provide the gateway for startups and food producers,” explains Mortensen. “Our test centers, for example, have the latest and most efficient equipment and come with operator expertise which helps customers attract investment and get to market more quickly.” While much of the focus is on the ingredients market at the moment, biotech solutions will become increasingly integral to end products for consumers, further closing the gap between demand and supply for products we could, but would rather not, live without.