The secrets of lab-grown chocolate

The world's insatiable love of chocolate is facing a challenge as climate change threatens the rainforests where cocoa beans grow, but don't panic yet because scientists may have found a sweet solution.

Lab-grown chocolate is providing a "glimmer of hope" for "chocolate aficionados", said The Mirror, and industry figures believe the products could be both healthier and tastier than conventional chocolate.

Petri dish intrigue 

"The idea of chocolate being created in a petri dish is intriguing", said Good Food on KCRW. Lab-grown chocolate is created through a procedure called cellular agriculture, where cocoa bean cells are cultured in a vat of sugary water, similar to how plant cells are cultivated, and then processed to produce a chocolate product.

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The process means the cells can multiply swiftly and mature within a week, in contrast to the six to eight months usually required for a conventional cocoa crop, and it's hoped that the finished products could rival traditional chocolate in several ways.

Cultured chocolate could be "even better than the tree-grown kind", Alan Perlstein, CEO of California Cultured, which cultivates cocoa cells in West Sacramento, in the US, told New Scientist, because it could have higher levels of chemicals such as polyphenols that "might have health benefits". It won't have contaminants such as "heavy metals taken up from the soil or pesticides sprayed on crops", but it might have a taste that "rivals anything on the market".

Industry meltdown

The development comes as the price of cocoa beans has quadrupled, so the "main appeal" of obtaining raw ingredients from vats not trees is the "potentially unlimited supply", said New Scientist.

The chocolate industry is "having a meltdown", said CNN in September, as crops in West Africa – which produces 80% of the world's cocoa – were "hit by droughts" made worse by climate change.

In response to the issues, some plants "stopped or scaled down" production, while leading manufacturers "raised prices and cut sales estimates". Another problem is that cocoa is one of the "leading drivers" of illegal deforestation and there's also evidence of child labour and slavery in cocoa farms in Africa and Brazil.

While demand for chocolate has risen in recent years, "supply has been falling", said New Scientist, which means that "every chocolate company is desperate", said Perlstein, of California Cultured, which hopes to have its products on the market within months.

Chocolate is just part of a wider trend of lab-grown food, which could be sold in the UK within two years, as the Food Standards Agency looks at how it can "speed up the approval process" for such products, said the BBC.