Israeli food biotech company Celleste Bio has partnered with US confectionery and snacks giant Mondelēz International to produce milk chocolate bars made with cell-cultured cocoa butter, Food Processing reported.
After launching its cell-cultured cocoa butter in October, Celleste worked with investment partner Mondelēz to manufacture chocolate bars using the ingredient, the 15 April report said.
According to its website, Celleste uses a combination of biotechnology, agricultural technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to produce cocoa ingredients.
The company establishes cell cultures from cocoa beans, then grows and harvests cocoa cells in a cultivator before processing and extracting the cocoa butter and powder.
Celleste was “on track to produce one tonne of cocoa butter annually in a 1,000-litre bioreactor from a single bean,” the company’s chief technical and scientific officer Hanne Volpin was quoted as saying.
Mondelēz produced about a dozen of the milk chocolate bars using the cell-cultured cocoa butter and found that they met integrity and consumption standards for its products, Food Processing wrote.
The milestone of making chocolate bars with the product using real-world production standards, demonstrated that Celleste’s cell-cultured butter functioned identically to traditional cocoa butter delivering the same texture, melt profile and sensory experience, the company said.
Celleste said it planned to scale up production to reach market-ready quantities of the product within the next two years.
The company said it was also using artificial intelligence (AI) computational modelling to customise melting points and taste experiences of its cocoa butter to meet specific customer demands.
