The Lab That Could Save Your Morning Coffee and Your Chocolate Fix
Two of the most dependable daily pleasures in an American man's life — the first cup of coffee and the square of dark chocolate snapped off at the end of a long day — are facing an existential threat that has nothing to do with price inflation or bad harvests. The crisis runs deeper than that, rooted in shifting climate patterns that are quietly dismantling the agricultural foundations of both industries. Now, a cluster of Israeli biotechnology startups are betting that the answer to saving cacao and coffee doesn't lie in better farming techniques or drought-resistant seeds. It lies in a bioreactor.
Welcome to the world of cellular agriculture applied to plants — a scientific discipline that, until recently, was almost exclusively associated with lab-grown meat. The same principles that allow researchers to culture animal muscle tissue outside of a living creature are now being applied to plant cells. The goal: produce real cacao and real coffee, with their complete chemistry intact, without ever planting a seed in tropical soil.
A Supply Chain on the Edge
For most people, chocolate and coffee are daily necessities and simple pleasures. Yet both industries face mounting threats from climate change, raising serious concerns about how these beloved products will be produced in the decades ahead. The numbers behind that concern are stark and well-documented.
Scientists warn that cacao, the key ingredient in chocolate, is increasingly vulnerable. By 2050, more than 50% of current cacao-growing land could become unsuitable for cultivation because of rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns. On the coffee side, the outlook is equally grim. Pluri CEO Yaky Yanay explained that due to climate change within the next two decades, there is an expected 50% reduction in areas suitable for growing coffee. "Because of the change in temperatures, many areas suitable for growing coffee today will not be available anymore. We are already starting to see this in parts of Africa," Yanay said. "This would mean a significant reduction in capacity to supply coffee."
Although cacao originated in the Amazon rainforest more than 5,000 years ago and was once referred to by ancient civilizations as the "food of the gods," roughly 80% of today's global supply is produced in West Africa, where changing environmental conditions are placing additional strain on production. That geographic concentration is itself a vulnerability — one severe weather season can cascade through the entire global supply. Recent severe weather events have already negatively impacted cacao harvests in Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world's biggest producers, causing significant shortages and high prices.
The environmental ledger cuts both ways. Producing cocoa products has a highly detrimental impact on the planet — only beef pollutes the atmosphere more than dark chocolate, and cocoa beans have one of the highest carbon opportunity costs of any food. Each bar of chocolate requires 1,700 litres of water on average. Coffee is no cleaner. Coffee requires a high volume of water to grow — as much as 140 liters for every single cup consumed. The industries that produce these commodities are, in other words, simultaneously threatened by climate change and actively contributing to it.
Israel Steps Into the Bioreactor
To address these challenges, Israeli startups are turning to cellular agriculture, developing technologies that produce cacao and coffee through controlled cultivation processes rather than relying solely on traditional farming. The country has built a formidable foodtech ecosystem over the past decade, and it is now exporting that infrastructure into two of the most globally traded agricultural commodities on earth.
The core concept isn't magic — it's cell biology at industrial scale. One company is working to create cacao products by cultivating cacao cells directly, eliminating the need to wait years for cacao trees to mature. "Instead of growing a cacao tree in nature for six or seven years and at the end using only the bean, we are saying we don't need to do that," a representative involved in the technology explained. "We can do local production. You can put the plant anywhere in the world, outside of the equator, very close in proximity to the factories that are already producing." That single statement reframes the entire geography of the chocolate and coffee trades. No more dependency on equatorial belt farmland. No more price shocks from droughts in Ghana or frosts in Brazil.
Kokomodo: Building a Cacao Cell Library
Israeli startup Kokomodo emerged from stealth to produce cocoa via plant cell culture, armed with $750,000 from The Kitchen FoodTech Hub by Strauss and the Israel Innovation Authority. The startup, co-founded by Tal Govrin in 2024, is a joint venture between The Kitchen FoodTech Hub and Tel Aviv-based Plantae Bioscience.
Kokomodo's cell-cultivating process involves carefully selecting cells from premium cacao beans sourced from Central and Latin America and growing them in bioreactors, nurtured with tailored growth media containing sugars, vitamins, and minerals. These cells are nourished with a specific nutrient solution to encourage growth, and once the cell mass reaches a sufficient size, it is harvested and processed into cocoa powder. What Kokomodo has built, though, goes beyond a single production line. The startup has developed a large collection of cell lines that are characterized and stable, a process that takes a few years to achieve. "Our cell lines originate from different varieties and genotypes and from different parts of the cacao seedling, making the lines even more unique," the company's CEO explained.
The sourcing strategy was deliberate. The startup chose to source from Latin America, as the region is known for its premium cocoa beans. "We aimed to obtain different varieties and genotypes to explore and take advantage of the potential of natural variance. We also obtain different cell lines originating from different parts of the cacao seedling while creating a cacao cell library and analytical capabilities to seek out the best cacao cells to produce," explains Govrin.
The technology enables a stable supply of cacao all-year-round, believes co-founder and CEO Tal Govrin. "With climate change threatening cocoa, a non-agricultural method of production could ensure its survival for future generations." Kokomodo's first commercial product is a high-value cell-cultivated cocoa powder designed for products across the food, beverage, supplement, and cosmetics industries, with a cell-cultivated cocoa butter planned as the follow-on launch.
The company's trajectory accelerated sharply at the start of 2025. Israeli firm Pluri, which has developed proprietary packed bed bioreactors for growing animal and plant cells at subsidiaries including Ever After Foods and Coffeesai, acquired a controlling stake in Kokomodo. The acquisition, which followed a $6.5 million investment from global investor Alejandro Weinstein, will enable Kokomodo to tap into Pluri's expertise and more rapidly scale its technology. The strategic rationale is straightforward: Pluri has already cracked some of the hardest scaling problems in cellular agriculture, and Kokomodo now gets to leapfrog years of engineering work. "The first cost estimates that we have applying Pluri's technology into the production of Kokomodo cacao are very promising and will give Kokomodo a tremendous competitive advantage in this vertical."
Celleste Bio: From Stealth to Mondelēz-Backed Chocolate Bars
If Kokomodo represents the ambitious startup stage of this revolution, Celleste Bio represents what happens when cell-based cocoa grows up. The Tel Aviv-based firm has created cocoa butter from plant cell culture technology and developed it using real cocoa cells grown in suspension in a bioreactor. The company's list of investors includes Cadbury and Oreo maker Mondelēz International. The backing of one of the world's largest confectionery corporations is not a minor footnote — it signals that the industry's biggest incumbents are hedging against the scenario where conventional cocoa supply genuinely falters.
Celleste Bio announced it has produced milk chocolate bars using cocoa butter grown through cell suspension culture technology, rather than harvested from cocoa trees. The bars, created in collaboration with Mondelēz International, are described as meeting the same consumption and quality standards as conventional chocolate products. That last detail matters enormously. The history of food technology is littered with lab-produced alternatives that failed the simple test of tasting like the real thing. Celleste claims it has cleared that bar.
The efficiency numbers are difficult to overstate. The process takes one to two beans to produce the same amount of cocoa butter that traditionally requires four tonnes of cocoa and 10,000 square meters of land. For context, that is a compression of land requirements so extreme it borders on the unbelievable — yet it is the logical consequence of removing the tree from the equation entirely. According to the company's chief technical and scientific officer, a single cocoa bean could be used to generate up to one ton of cocoa butter annually in a 1,000-liter bioreactor, an output that would otherwise require about a hectare of cocoa trees.
Celleste's ambition extends beyond simply replicating existing ingredients. The company is positioning its technology as a way to reshape how chocolate is made. Its platform incorporates artificial intelligence-based computational modeling, which it says could allow manufacturers to tailor cocoa butter to specific requirements, such as altering melting points or modifying flavor profiles. If realized, such capabilities would represent a shift from agriculture-defined inputs to engineered ones, potentially giving manufacturers greater control over product characteristics. The implications for product developers and chocolatiers are significant: rather than accepting whatever chemistry a particular harvest delivers, they could theoretically dial in the exact fat composition they need.
On the regulatory front, the company is currently in the regulatory process in the US, the EU, the UK, and Israel, and anticipates being market-ready by 2027.
Pluri and Coffeesai: Reinventing What's in Your Cup
Pluri, the publicly listed Israeli biotech that acquired Kokomodo and whose proprietary bioreactor technology underpins much of this ecosystem, has also trained its sights on coffee through a dedicated subsidiary. Pluri, a biotech startup from Israel that previously established Ever After Foods to produce a bioreactor platform for cell-cultured meat, is now applying its technology to a drink consumed two billion times every day, all over the world.
Pluri has launched its cell-based coffee business to "revolutionise" the $132 billion industry, with a product designed to address the growing demand for high-quality coffee. The water savings alone make the technology commercially compelling in regions where water scarcity is tightening. In contrast to conventional coffee production methods, the company says its cell-based coffee is projected to reduce water consumption by an impressive 98%.
PluriAgtech, a subsidiary of Pluri, can produce high-quality "real" coffee at scale, reducing water usage by 98% and growing areas by 95%. Pluri also secured a patent from the Israel Patent Office for its "System for 3D Cultivation of Plant Cells and Methods of Use," which is claimed to be the first-ever patent approval for 3D bioreactor technology in plant cell cultivation. That patent represents a meaningful moat. If the 3D bioreactor architecture proves to be the dominant production method as the industry scales, Pluri holds a foundational IP position across multiple commodities simultaneously.
Early tastings suggest the alternative coffee may offer a slightly different sensory experience. Some testers described it as having a sweeter aroma while maintaining familiar coffee characteristics. A sweeter aroma with recognizable coffee character is, for most coffee drinkers, well within the acceptable range — certainly preferable to no coffee at all.
The Science Behind the Bioreactor
For those accustomed to thinking about agricultural commodities as products of soil, rain, and sun, the mechanics of plant cell cultivation require a small mental reorientation. The process relies on advanced bioreactor systems designed to replicate the environmental conditions plants need to grow. Instead of a tree or a shrub doing that biochemical work over years in a tropical field, a controlled vessel does it in weeks under laboratory conditions.
Celleste Bio uses AI and bioreactors to produce customizable, high-quality cocoa butter and powder at scale. It extracts a small sample of cells from a cocoa bean and places them in a controlled environment, where the cells are nourished with a nutrient-rich solution that encourages them to multiply readily. The elegance of the approach is that you're not creating something artificial — you're working with genuinely real cacao cells and asking them to do what they would naturally do inside the bean, just faster and without the tree attached.
The advantages stack up quickly once you remove geography from the equation. Plant cell culture can ensure a consistent supply of botanicals with supply chains increasingly threatened by climate change and unpredictable weather, political instability, adulteration, disease, and heavy metals and pesticides from soil. It also offers the promise of rapid, consistent, and controlled production of plant compounds regardless of season or location in a sterile environment, with no pesticides. And it can deliver higher yields.
Traditional cacao farming causes 70% of deforestation in West Africa, contributing to significant biodiversity loss, and is highly vulnerable to fluctuations in climate. Cacao is also susceptible to diseases and pests, meaning traditional farming faces significant yield losses. Cell cultivation sidesteps all of those vulnerabilities simultaneously.
Big Food Is Paying Attention
When Mondelēz — the corporate parent of Cadbury, Oreo, and Toblerone — puts money into a cell-based cocoa startup, it's not a philosophical gesture toward sustainability. It's a hedge against a supply chain that the company's own analysts have surely flagged as high-risk. Belgian ingredients group Puratos confirmed plans to launch a chocolate ingredient containing cultured cocoa for professional customers in the US, developed with California Cultured. Meanwhile, Mondelēz International has backed Israeli cocoa-tech company Celleste Bio, Lindt & Sprüngli has invested in Swiss startup Food Brewer, and Barry Callebaut is exploring cocoa cell culture with researchers at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
The alignment of corporate giants and scrappy startups around the same technology in the same window of time suggests this is not a niche experiment. Celleste Bio secured $4.5 million in funding to scale up cell-based cocoa production, with investors including Mondelēz International's SnackFutures Ventures, showing growing interest from major food corporations. The industry structure is beginning to look like the early days of plant-based protein — where disruptive startups attracted strategic investment from the incumbents most threatened by disruption.
Ian Roberts, chief technology officer at Bühler Group, describes plant cell cultivation as "an important new frontier in sustainable food and ingredient production," though he acknowledges that scaling these systems to industrial volumes remains a major challenge. For the chocolate industry, that scaling question may ultimately determine whether cultured cocoa remains a laboratory concept or becomes a viable commercial ingredient. Roberts' framing captures the core tension: the science works, the economics are improving, but the chasm between pilot-scale bioreactors and the volumes required to supply a global industry has not yet been fully bridged.
Not a Replacement — A Lifeline
One of the more politically sensitive questions hovering over this entire sector is what happens to the farmers — the millions of smallholders across West Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia whose livelihoods depend on growing cacao and coffee. The founders and executives in this space are consistent and pointed in their response. "One of the things that we have been asked is whether this technology is going to replace conventional farming and farmers," one expert said. "The answer is absolutely no."
Instead, advocates see cell-based production as a way to strengthen supply chains, reduce environmental pressures, and help safeguard the future availability of products that millions of people enjoy every day. The framing matters. If cell-based production can absorb the demand overhang — the gap between what conventional agriculture can supply and what a growing global middle class will want — traditional farmers gain price stability rather than market displacement. With demand for cocoa expected to dramatically exceed supply in the coming years, a flurry of creative solutions has emerged, with startups exploring alternatives made with everything from carob and barley to upcycled coffee grounds and grape seeds. Cell cultivation sits at the premium end of that response spectrum, offering the real thing rather than a facsimile.
"Kokomodo was born from a profound passion for preserving the supply of cocoa," says Govrin. "Our cellular agriculture technology ensures a steady flow of premium, health-boosting cocoa, aligning consumer enjoyment with global responsibility."
A Global Race With Israeli Startups at the Front
Israel does not grow cacao. It does not grow coffee. The country's climate and geography make it about as ill-suited to tropical commodity farming as any place on earth. And yet, Kokomodo is developing a platform to produce cacao locally with cells and advanced bioreactors, independently from land, climate, and tropical regions. The startup already operates a pilot-scale lab in Israel — not exactly a tropical country with cacao plantations. That disconnect is precisely the point. Cellular agriculture decouples production from geography, and Israel's strengths in biotech, agri-innovation, and materials science make it an unlikely but logical home base for this work.
Kokomodo is among just a handful of companies working on cell-based chocolate, alongside fellow Israeli startup Celleste Bio, US producer California Cultured, and Finnish giant Fazer. More companies — such as Voyage Foods, Planet A Foods, and Foreverland — are instead making cocoa-free alternatives to chocolate, using plants and fermentation to create chocolate-like products. The distinction matters to purists and to food scientists alike: the Israeli approach insists on using real cacao cells, not analogues. "We master the very essence of cacao as we select and cultivate cacao cells from a variety of real premium beans. It is the real thing."
The competitive landscape is accelerating. Across Europe, Israel, and the US, scientists and startups are testing ways to produce cocoa ingredients without growing cacao trees at all. Some are cultivating cacao cells in bioreactors. Others are attempting to recreate chocolate's flavor chemistry through fermentation. Each approach has its advocates, but the cell-based method holds a particular appeal for ingredient buyers and food manufacturers who need their products to carry authentic provenance claims — that it is, at its molecular core, real cocoa.
What It Means for the Future of Flavor
The morning ritual of grinding fresh beans and the pleasure of breaking into a quality chocolate bar are, for many men, among the few genuinely irreplaceable sensory anchors in a daily routine. The threat to both is real, the timeline is not abstract, and the technological response is already underway. Israeli startups are leading a wave of innovation that could determine whether those experiences remain available to the next generation at anything close to current prices and quality levels.
Our morning cup is in danger of vanishing — not because you've drunk it, but because there won't be enough to drink in the first place. Solutions are necessary, especially since we'll be demanding three times more coffee by mid-century. Cell cultivation is one of the most technically credible responses to that demand equation on the table today.
The bioreactor won't replace the Guatemalan highland estate or the Ivory Coast cooperative. But it may be what keeps their products in your cup and on your shelf when the climate makes conventional production untenable at scale. For an industry accustomed to measuring progress in harvest cycles and rainfall data, that's a genuinely radical idea — one that Israel, it turns out, is uniquely positioned to deliver.
