California Cultured and Puratos: Cocoa Grown in a Tank, Sold First to Pastry Chefs

The first commercial outlet for cell-cultured cocoa is the professional pastry kitchen, and it arrives in a market where the price of the real thing has already fallen by about half from its peak.

By Carry and Conquer Publications

When Hershey reported fourth-quarter results in early 2026, net income had dropped 59.9 percent to $320 million, as soaring cocoa and tariff costs outran the price increases it had pushed through. The chocolate industry has spent two years searching for a way to stop its raw material from dictating its earnings. One answer is taking shape in a 12,000 square foot facility in West Sacramento, where a startup called California Cultured grows cocoa cells in tanks instead of on trees. Its first major customer is not a candy maker but Puratos, the Belgian bakery-ingredients group, which plans to put a cultured-cocoa chocolate in front of professional pastry chefs in the United States before the end of 2026.

A Tank Instead of a Tree

California Cultured was founded in 2020 by Alan Perlstein, its chief executive, and Harrison Yoon, a plant cell culture specialist who previously served as chief scientific officer at Diana Plant Sciences. Perlstein is a second-time founder who spent several years coaxing microbes into making sweet proteins in fermentation tanks before he moved to plant cells. The company started in Davis and later relocated to West Sacramento. Its $4 million seed round in October 2021 was led by Agronomics, which contributed $2.2 million, with the IndieBio accelerator also participating. By March 2026, Steve Stearns, its head of strategy and business development and a former chef at Noma, put total capital raised at roughly $15.9 million, with a Series A3 round in the market.

The method starts with cells taken from cocoa plants selected for flavor. Those cells are fed in bioreactors on a mix that is mostly dextrose, topped up with amino acids, minerals and phytonutrients, and they can be harvested within days rather than the months a tree needs. For chocolate-grade material, the harvested biomass is fermented with microbes, dried and roasted, the same sequence a conventional bean goes through. For the first product, a cocoa powder, handling is kept to a minimum to protect flavanols, the compounds linked to cocoa's cardiovascular reputation. Perlstein has said that native cocoa beans hold under 1 percent flavanols by mass, while the cultured material reaches 20 to 25 percent by weight.

Why the Pastry Kitchen Comes First

Puratos announced the project in February 2026 through Sparkalis, its venture arm, which had invested an undisclosed sum in California Cultured in October 2024. The pitch is a chocolate for chefs, chocolatiers, large food manufacturers and food brands, available to Puratos customers in the United States toward the end of this year, and billed by the company as the first of its kind for professionals.

The pastry channel is a deliberate choice. Youri Dumont, business unit director for chocolate at Puratos, told Food Ingredients First that cultured cocoa has a somewhat fruitier flavor profile, and that his team's job is to understand it precisely and work with it. Puratos benchmarks melting behavior, viscosity, texture and stability through baking, molding, enrobing and filling, because a professional will not tolerate an ingredient that behaves unpredictably on the line. Perlstein framed the same point from the supplier side: chocolate makers need something that behaves like cocoa, tastes like cocoa and arrives on schedule. Year one, Dumont said, will be demand-driven, with no volume targets.

California Cultured's own commercial plan points the same way. Stearns says the company is starting where cocoa powder is already used at scale, in baked goods, beverages, coatings and snacks, and that its model is to plug into partners' existing manufacturing and distribution instead of building a consumer brand. Japan's Meiji, an investor, holds a separate decade-long co-development deal that includes confectionery inclusions, with products also due in the United States this year. Puratos is careful to describe cultured cocoa as a complement to farming. It points to its Cacao-Trace program, which works with more than 20,000 farmers and aims to reach 50,000 by 2030.

The Regulatory Clock

Nothing ships without a legal footing. California Cultured has self-affirmed that its cocoa powder is Generally Recognized as Safe and has also notified the FDA, seeking a "no questions" letter. It claims the first such filing for cocoa powder made through plant cell culture. The extra step looks prudent. The FDA has proposed a rule that would make notification mandatory for self-affirmed GRAS ingredients, with public comment open until December 9, 2026, and an existing-ingredient window of one year under the proposal. Dumont says labeling requirements are still under review and that Puratos wants any product to be legally recognizable as chocolate where it is sold.

Europe is a longer road. Lab-grown cocoa counts there as a novel food, an approval process that can take up to three years, and no cell-based food has yet cleared it. That is one reason both companies are starting in the United States.

Falling Prices, Tightening Crop

The awkward twist is timing. New York cocoa futures hit a record of $12,565 a tonne in mid-December 2024. By mid-February 2026 they had fallen roughly 45 percent since the start of the year, and they bottomed near $3,000 in the spring before rebounding to around $6,000 by late August. That is still about half the peak. Ivory Coast farmers had shipped 2.14 million tonnes to ports by the end of August, up 19 percent on the year, and ICE inventories sat at a two-year high above 3.4 million bags.

The supply picture for the coming season points the other way. Ghana's cocoa board estimates the 2026/27 crop at 650,000 tonnes, down 13 percent from 750,000, after an earlier warning of as little as 450,000 to 550,000. Early Ivory Coast assessments suggest about 1.8 million tonnes, down 18 percent. StoneX has cut its 2026/27 surplus forecast to 25,000 tonnes from 149,000, and Transgraph expects 80,000 tonnes against 415,000 a year earlier. A tank-grown product therefore launches into a market that is cheap today and fragile tomorrow, which is a better argument for supply security than for a lower price.

Can It Win on Price, or Only on Supply?

Perlstein's bet is that cost lives in the vessel. Steel bioreactors need steam, piping and concrete, he told AgFunderNews, and only make sense for something as valuable as a cancer drug. California Cultured has instead built reusable plastic reactors, and in March 2026 it reported its first successful production run in a 2,000 liter unit. Its work with UC Davis, backed by National Science Foundation and BioMADE grants, centers on 1,600 liter reactors. Steve Lang, the company's vice president of science and technology, has said commercial powder production should begin in early 2027 to fill a first purchase order from a chocolate company, a date that sits a few months behind the Puratos launch target.

Stearns projects 160,000 liters of capacity over the next year and a 76 percent operating margin on the first product at that scale. Both numbers are company projections, and in the coverage reviewed for this profile no per-kilogram cost has been published. Perlstein himself has said investors will be convinced when 200,000 liters of the newer reactors are producing. The first product also sidesteps a head-on fight with commodity beans: it is pitched less as cheaper cocoa than as a cleaner, more concentrated one, free of the lead and cadmium that soil-grown flavanol products can carry.

Critics say the framing misses the point. Fairtrade notes that cocoa farmers receive around 6 percent of the final value of a chocolate bar and argues that lab-grown cocoa does nothing to fix that. It wants clear on-pack disclosure and no claims that cultured cocoa is inherently more ethical.

A Crowded Race, Tested in Pastry

California Cultured is not alone. Celleste Bio works with Mondelez International, Kokomodo with Cargill, and Food Brewer with Lindt and Sparkalis itself, which put money into the Swiss startup alongside Lindt in a CHF 5 million extension in March 2025. Barry Callebaut, the largest business-to-business chocolate supplier, is exploring both cell-based and cocoa-free routes. Puratos is therefore hedging across more than one tank.

The pastry channel is where those bets get their first honest answer. A chef will notice a fruitier note, a different melt, a fat that behaves a little differently under heat, and will say so; a procurement manager will compare the invoice with a bean-based couverture priced off a market that keeps changing its mind. If cultured cocoa holds up in a laminated dough and a ganache, and holds its price through a crop that analysts expect to shrink, it earns a path toward the larger cocoa powder and coatings markets. If it needs a falling bean price to survive, the pastry case will show that first.