MayHawk Insights 04
Laboratory Chocolate and the Future of the Cacao Belt
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” — Voltaire
Something is growing in a laboratory in Birmingham. Also in Sacramento. The implications for the five to six million smallholder farmers who grow the world’s cocoa — across West Africa, Latin America, and Asia — are only just beginning to be understood.
What Is Actually Happening
Laboratory-grown chocolate is no longer a concept. It is a 2026 commercial reality, moving faster than most of the industry has publicly acknowledged.
California Cultured, working with researchers at the University of California Davis, has demonstrated proof-of-concept for growing cacao cells in 1,600-litre bioreactors. The process begins with a small tissue sample taken from a cocoa bean or leaf, placed into a controlled environment of nutrients, water, and plant hormones, and grown into cocoa biomass — containing both cocoa solids and cocoa butter — without land, without pesticides, and without the geographic constraints of the cacao belt. Commercial cocoa powder production is anticipated in early 2027.
Can we make chocolate in a lab? used to be the question. Can we scale it? is now the question.
In February 2026, Belgian ingredient supplier Puratos announced the world’s first professional chocolate product containing cell-based cocoa, with a US commercial rollout planned by year end. Celleste Bio — an Israeli startup backed by Mondelēz International, the owner of Cadbury, Oreo, and Toblerone — introduced chocolate-grade prototypes using lab-grown cocoa butter in October 2025. Barry Callebaut, which supplies chocolate to most of the major brands most people have encountered, announced a partnership with California Cultured in August 2025 to develop cultivated cocoa at commercial scale.
This is not startup enthusiasm. It is a well funded disruptor economy mechanism. The industrial infrastructure of chocolate production is already moving — fast — and the consequences will be felt for decades.
Why the Industry Is Moving
The supply crisis that precipitated this investment was real and severe.
Cocoa production in West Africa — which accounts for approximately 70% of global supply — fell by up to 40% between 2023 and 2025. A combination of El Niño weather disruption, cocoa swollen shoot virus devastating crops across Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, ageing tree stock, and prolonged drought drove the price of cocoa to $12,000 per tonne in early 2025 — the highest in decades.
Economics can only stretch a chocolate bar so far before the consumer notices. Major manufacturers quietly reformulated products. Some bars became smaller. Ingredient lists changed. People noticed.
Out of all the arguments for industrial change, climate projection is the most troubling to the multinationals. Analysis by Wageningen University indicates that up to 50% of current cocoa-growing areas in Côte d’Ivoire could become unsuitable by 2060 due to shifting temperature and rainfall patterns. The cacao tree is fragile — temperature-sensitive, disease-prone, confined to a narrow equatorial band. The bioreactor removes all of those vulnerabilities in a single step.
If you need a reliable supply of cocoa and the climate is making that supply increasingly unreliable, a controlled laboratory environment is a rational industrial response. That logic, born of economics, is coherent. What it excludes are the harder questions.
The Economic Argument — and Its Underside
The companies investing most heavily in lab-grown chocolate are the same companies that have spent decades paying West African farmers far below subsistence wages.
In 2022, the global chocolate industry generated $206 billion in revenue. In the same year, cocoa farmers in West Africa often earned less than $2.15 per day — the World Bank’s extreme poverty threshold. The living income differential has been acknowledged by the industry for over two decades. It has not been closed.
The Corporate Accountability Lab documented in 2023 that child labour remains endemic across the cocoa supply chain — not as a cultural anomaly, but as a direct economic consequence of poverty wages. Farmers who cannot afford adult labour use their children. The industry has known this. The certifications have not resolved it.
Against this backdrop, the investment in technology that removes farmers from the supply chain entirely warrants scrutiny. The environmental framing — climate resilience, reduced deforestation, cleaner production — is genuine. It is also convenient.
The Environmental Ambiguity of Lab Grown Chocolate
The environmental case for lab-grown chocolate is real, but incomplete.
Between 2001 and 2023, Ghana lost 24% of its total tree coverage and Côte d’Ivoire 26% — driven significantly by the expansion of cocoa farming as producers cleared older forest to plant higher-yield trees. A shift away from land-intensive cocoa farming would reduce this pressure. That is measurable.
But bioreactors are energy-intensive. The carbon footprint of industrial biomanufacturing at commercial scale has not been fully calculated, and none of the major developers has made this calculation transparently. The environmental argument depends entirely on what powers the production facility. Renewable energy produces a credible case. A fossil fuel grid substantially undermines it.
The environmental framing remains, for now, an assertion rather than a proof.
The Humanitarian Consequence
The cocoa belt economies of West Africa are monocultural in a way that makes them acutely fragile. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire produce approximately 70% of the world’s cocoa. For the rural communities built around that harvest, cocoa is not one of several options. It is the economy.
When industrial demand for a single commodity collapses in a monocultural agricultural system, the consequences move faster than any policy response can address. The Ethiopian famine of the 1980s and the structural collapse of single-commodity agricultural economies across sub-Saharan Africa in subsequent decades are documented precedent.
Fairtrade issued a formal statement on lab-grown cocoa in April 2026, noting that cocoa farming provides income for millions of smallholders who already earn below the extreme poverty line, face increasing climate pressure, and operate in volatile global markets. Its position: any shift toward lab-grown alternatives must not make the people who grow the world’s cocoa more vulnerable.
The question the industry has not yet answered is this: if lab-grown chocolate achieves price parity with farmed cocoa at industrial scale, what happens to the five million people whose livelihoods depend on the alternative?
Craft and the Flavour Question
Research published in 2025 established that fermentation drives flavour development in chocolate more decisively than cacao genetics alone. The microbial communities that form during post-harvest fermentation — wild, site-specific, shaped by the soil, the climate, and the agricultural practices of a named origin — are what produce chocolate’s complexity.
When lab-grown cocoa was tested against fine chocolate, it was found to be missing caramel, nut, and light wood flavour compounds. A Criollo from Ecuador, fermented in the specific conditions of that origin, produces what a bioreactor growing cells in controlled nutrient media cannot yet replicate.
The ten genetic clusters identified by the Motamayor research in 2008 — the foundation of the craft sector’s vocabulary of provenance, varietal distinction, and terroir — are exactly what bioreactor homogenisation erases.
Here it is worth being precise and honest about what the craft sector has built since 2005. It has spent twenty years creating a ‘language’, similar to the wine trade, to build out a new commercial sector within the industry. To create this space craft chocolate has had to justify its prices, and it has used education to do it. Awareness of the craft industry has grown exponentially over the last twenty years, moving beyond just the ethics, to what chocolate ‘should’ be. This is more beneficial than can be measured, yet issues are arising over a new unregulated gatekeeper economy, a related sector that has grown in size around craft chocolate.
In craft chocolate, these are the chains that bind us.
The rarer the named cacao origin, the higher the price. Good cacao is sought after. Terroir is real. It is also a real sales mechanism, one being exploited by a new breed of industry gatekeepers to promote themselves. Craft chocolate, as a section of the industry, charges more money than its industrial counterpart — but chocolate made in small, single-origin specific, batches is becoming more expensive, and not everyone can afford it.
Yet, this is also the single most important differentiator — higher prices create a virtuous cycle. The craft sector pays farmers significantly better for their cocoa beans than the commercial sector does. This money is reinvested in an economic cycle of improvements, not just in terms of family life, but also environmentally, which is better for the planet.
Supply-Chain Dynamics
Voltaire’s observation cuts in both directions.
The commercial sector moves toward technology that removes farmers and environment from the equation and calls it sustainability. The craft sector names origins, traces provenance, and reaches for the vocabulary of wine connoisseurs to justify prices.
Consider who sits at each end of this supply chain. The poorest consumers buy cheap industrial chocolate — degraded ingredients, inflated sugar levels, and now lab-grown cocoa powder, the chemistry of a price point. The poorest plantation workers, at the moment, grow the raw ingredient that makes it all possible, on wages that can’t sustain a family or provide any investment in new cacao stock.
In the middle sits the craft chocolate sector. Charging more for their product, but paying farmers better — serving a consumer who can afford the difference. That is a genuine improvement. But it is not a solution.
It does not reach the majority of West African farmers who don’t grow quality cacao. It does not change the obesity epidemic, what is being fed, one reformulated bar at a time, to the children the industry’s economics have always depended on. Real solutions to these problems need government legislation and co-ordinated UN policy.
This is the considered opinion of MayHawk
If meaningful change doesn’t happen, then the burden falls elsewhere. Craft chocolate — or rather its ethos — needs to take a real share of the market. Enough to force a rethink. That means consumers buying less chocolate and buying better versions of it. It means the craft sector becoming more professional, more commercial, more capable of competing at scale. Keeping the same ideals. The same standards. Using education over accusation — with a language of inclusion not exclusion.
Craft chocolate has gained an increasing market share since 2005. It may take decades more to produce a genuine shift in consumer purchasing. Lab-grown chocolate is already here, it will not wait. The commercial sector has its climate solution. The craft sector has its terroir. The five to six million smallholder farmers who grow the world’s cocoa need a middle ground. A solution that doesn’t repeat the exploitation that the existing system has always depended on.
Good chocolate, ethically sourced, made properly, paid for fairly, is worth fighting for at scale. At MayHawk we are building toward that.
TLDR: The technology is real. The commercial partnerships are confirmed. The first lab-grown chocolate products are predicted to reach the market soon.