December 19, 2024

By Gerelyn Terzo, Global AgInvesting Media

After overhauling its venture capital arm earlier this year, Mondelēz International is making moves. The company’s venture capital arm, Mondelēz’s SnackFutures Ventures, has reportedly joined in the latest fundraising round for cocoa-tech startup Celleste Bio. Based in Misgav, Israel, Celleste Bio is behind a proprietary cocoa technology designed to lower the food industry’s dependence on critical rainforests for cocoa.

Mondelēz’s backing brings Celleste Bio’s fundraising tally for this seed round to $4.5 million, led by Supply Change Capital. Other participants included Consensus Business Group, The Trendlines Group, Barrel Ventures and Regba Agriculture. According to reports, Celleste Bio plans to direct the proceeds toward scaling the production of its 100 percent natural cocoa ingredients, which the company is able to source without cutting down a single tree. Celleste Bio harnesses technology including artificial intelligence (AI) models to grow natural cocoa from a bean or two in what it calls optimal conditions, with the potential for one ton of cocoa butter per cocoa pod.

Mondelēz’s backing is a ringing endorsement for the alternative chocolate maker. After launching SnackFutures Ventures in 2018, the maker of Toblerone chocolate bars restructured the group earlier this year to specialize in VC investments. The original iteration, which it ran with the CoLab Program, was more of an accelerator for early-stage snack brands.

Now the company is focusing its capital on growth-stage startups with industry-disrupting capabilities. Mondelēz’s SnackFutures Ventures will target companies that are aligned with the consumer giant’s existing focus areas prior to adding them to its portfolio, according to the Richie Gray, vice president and global head of SnackFutures Ventures.

Gray is cited by Forbes as saying, “It’s been a test and learn process for us, and innovating from scratch requires a lot of hard work and resources. As a big company, we thrive on scale. We don’t operate as a traditional fund; it’s really about investing in the right businesses with capabilities and technologies relevant to our portfolio and future.”

While chocolate alternatives have been catching on of late, raising tens of millions of dollars from the VC and investor communities, it has done little to ease the volatility in cocoa prices, which have been soaring in 2024, most recently setting a new record of close to $12,000 per metric ton. The flagship New York Cocoa futures contract has skyrocketed over 180 percent year-to-date, fueled by challenging weather conditions and supply constraints in Western Africa, where roughly 75 percent of the world’s cocoa production happens.

Experts have warned that a one-two punch of climate change and deforestation has been depleting the resources required to grow the cocoa used to make chocolate, warning that this desirable bean could be extinct by 2050. Earlier this year, California-based Voyage Foods attracted $52 million to its coffers for its cocoa-free chocolate. And food-tech startup Planet A Foods, which is based in Munich, Germany, secured $30 million in a Series B round for its version of a cocoa-free, lower-carbon chocolate alternative.

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