November 14, 2022

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

The human love affair with chocolate has roots going back at least 2,000 years when cultures in the Americas began growing cocoa to use the beans to make a spicy drink including hot peppers. Today, 70 percent of the world’s cocoa bean supply comes from West African countries – mostly Ivory Coast and Ghana –  trying to satiate a near-endless global demand.

In the U.S. alone, Americans consume 58 million pounds of chocolate in just the single week surrounding Valentine’s Day. Now consider that it takes up to a full year for a tree to produce enough cocoa for just a half pound of chocolate, and you can see what producers are up against.

But that’s not all. The social and environmental impacts of cocoa production are steep. 

In Ivory Coast alone, it is estimated that 70 percent of the country’s deforestation is due to land being cleared for cocoa farming. Monocropping in high-production regions is leading to the degradation of soil fertility, and with limited knowledge of modern farming techniques and restricted access to finance, cocoa farmers are stuck in a cycle of low productivity and poverty, which in many cases is leading to child labor and slavery. And making the situation even more frustrating, pests and diseases are rampant across the industry, with as much as an estimated 40 percent of the crop being lost each year to these causes. 

However, new technologies can enable the sustainable production of cocoa ingredients without inflicting these miseries.

Trendlines Group, an investor and incubator advancing agrifood and medtech technologies that improve the human condition, announced the launch of Celleste Bio, a startup focused on producing high-value cocoa ingredients from naturally occurring cocoa cells without genetic modification or manipulation.

“Trendlines believes that the global need for more sustainable cocoa ingredients today and in the future, represents a tremendous opportunity for all stakeholders,” noted Nitza Kardish, PhD., CEO, Trendline Agrifood Fund.

Founded by four entrepreneurs with particular experience in cellular biology – Hanne Volpin, PhD, CTO of Celleste; Avishai Levy, MSc,E.; Orna Harel, PhD; and Daphna Michaeli, PhD- the Seed funding for the new company was led by Trendlines. They were joined in the round by global snack food leader Mondelēz International, U.S.-based venture investor in the food ecosystem Barrel Ventures, and Israeli agricultural cooperative Regba Group.

Hanne Volpin, PhD, co-founder and CTO, Celleste Bio commented, “We want to offer people the pleasure and health that high quality cocoa products provide, while eliminating the challenges of sustainable production that we face in cocoa production today.”

Just as Sweet

Cellular technology is one path to sustainable, consistent cocoa production, but there are also other channels currently being explored.

Last year, Cargill announced it was partnering with vertical farming leader AeroFarms in a novel, multi-year research initiative to examine the possibility of using controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to bring sustainability to cocoa production. 

Employing proprietary technologies and software-controlled LED grow lights, AeroFarms’ vertical indoor farms grow crops suspended above a nutrient rich solution with water, oxygen, and nutrients misted onto the plants’ roots. This system allows AeroFarms to produce crops twice as fast as traditional farming, reflecting productivity 390 times greater per square foot, using 95 percent less water.

Although AeroFarms has grown more than 550 crops, cocoa is a new one for the company, and this project presents an exciting opportunity to explore new ground, as it were. Through this multi-year collaboration, Cargill and AeroFarms are integrating Cargill’s knowledge in cocoa production and agronomy with AeroFarms’ expertise in CEA to conduct experiments using indoor production methods including hydroponics and aeroponics, as well as light, carbon dioxide, irrigation, nutrition, plant space, and pruning to identify and isolate the optimal conditions for cocoa tree growth.

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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