One day, the cocoa in beloved treats might come from a petri dish.

By Larissa Zimberoff

The decadent smell of chocolate wafted my way. I approached the table in front of me, and a chef with a bushy mustache handed me a thimble of hot cocoa. I tipped it back, swirled the liquid around in my mouth, and swallowed: creamy and sweet. Next, a guy wearing a hat gave me a confection coated in chocolate. As I chewed, it melted in my mouth.

This was no candy factory. It was the basement of IndieBio, a synthetic-biology accelerator in San Francisco. Around me were booths offering vegan oils to replace bacon fat and chickpea-protein “chicken” legs that you held by the bone, which was a stick. None of the chocolate I had eaten was chocolate at all: It was produced in a lab by scientists at California Cultured, a start-up based in Davis, California.

What I tossed back in moments had taken a team of seven about 10 months to produce, Alan Perlstein, the company’s CEO, told me. To make it, the scientists isolated individual cells from cacao plants and fed them nutrients. When the team had at least a couple hundred grams, it treated the mass like typical cocoa beans. The cells were fermented, roasted, and ground into chocolate. When added to cookies or candy, the end result tastes pretty close to the real deal, because, Perlstein said, “most of cocoa flavors come from how they’re processed.”