A Davis company developing sustainable and ethical lab-grown chocolate products has raised $4.5 million from global investors.
California Cultured is a 2020 startup working to produce lab-generated cocoa and chocolate compounds free from deforestation and child labor in the cocoa industry.
“The goal of our research and technology development is to get the cells to grow the exact flavors we want,” California Cultured CEO Alan Perlstein told the Business Journal. “The ultimate goal is to get flavors to be as good or surpass some high-quality chocolates.”
The product isn’t a chocolate substitute. It is a cell culture taken from cocoa pods and then raised in nutritious growing media. The company harvests the grown cells and ferments them to build flavor. It also roasts the cell-cultured cocoa nibs to add complexity, Perlstein said.
The funding round was led by U.K.-based venture capital firm Agronomics Ltd. and had participation from Blue Horizon, an investment firm in Zurich that specializes in agriculture and food processing, and SOSV, a venture firm in Princeton, New Jersey. Agronomics specializes in environmental sustainability in the food industry.
The funding came in waves, with most of the money coming in last fall, and then the round being oversubscribed this month.
“The cells that we grow have the bio-actives and the flavor components. But they are not as complex as chocolate. Not yet. Eventually they will be,” Perlstein said.
California Cultured is based in Davis to take advantage of the plant technology and biotechnology scientists in the region and at the University of California Davis, he said.
The company is currently in some private lab space in Inventopia, a Davis prototyping incubator space, as well as some other space.
But California Cultured needs to expand, Perlstein said. It has 17 employees now, and the scientists sometimes work in shifts to have lab space. Perlstein said California Cultured will likely have to move out of Davis because it's so difficult to find lab space in the college town, and the company will likely grow to 45 employees by the end of next year.
Perlstein said California Cultured also plans to build on scientific research done on specific compounds in cocoa that have medical benefits. Some of those compounds are lost during the process of making chocolate, and California Cultured could potentially isolate and generate those compounds.
With a growing population, climate change, disease, labor force challenges and other factors, growing food is going to be more difficult into the future, Perlstein said. “It is going to be erratic. We want to help build a better supply of the things we need.”
