Exclusive: California Cultured sets its sights on the World Confectionery Conference
With our World Confectionery Conference just around the corner, we speak to Alan Perlstein CEO of California Cultured, producing alternative sources of a lab-created chocolate that forms part of a wider evolution of food manufacturing methods. Editor Neill Barston quizzes him on its prospects as it prepares for a major commercial roll-out.
“We are at the beginning of the future of chocolate,” asserted Alan Perlstein in a recent interview on his ambitious biotech start-up business, California Cultured, which is fast making waves within the sector.
Indeed, some great developmental strides in science have been made in the past few years that have heralded a potential revolution within food production, and cocoa is clearly proving no exception to this. (Registration remains open for our event on 12 September via this direct link, where Alex Shandrovsky, of the company, will be representing the business as a speaker at our conference).
As Confectionery Production has covered within the past two years, the industry has seen the rapid rise of companies including Germany’s Planet A and UK-based Win-Win have made a name for themselves in using plant-based material side-streams to deliver alternative forms of chocolate.
While these firms have enjoyed some early traction with industry and attracted plenty of global media attention, California Cultured has taken a somewhat different, technology-led approach.
At its heart, its use of plant cell-cultures has been created to accurately mimic rainforest conditions within a laboratory setting to craft its own cocoa equivalent capable of delivering directly comparable flavour profiles.
While this may have been considered in the realms of science fiction even a decade ago, such has been the rate of knowledge gain in recent times that this nascent industry, which is now being strategically augmented with the assistance of AI in monitoring its processes, stands close to attaining a commercial breakthrough.
Located in West Sacramento, California, the company, which places a core of experienced scientists and industry specialists and its core, is among a small band of tech ventures around the world that are seeking to make a positive impact providing an alternative to traditional cocoa supplies. Its continued growth trend has been notably boosted through securing investment funding from major food sector players.
As its CEO revealed, with the key crop serving the global confectionery sector is presently facing severe pressure from climate, persistent disease and deforestation challenges, that has left an opportunity for science-based processes to provide a solution to the international test of meeting consumer demand.
Moreover, as we reported, the business has gained a notable deal with Japan’s largest confectionery group, Meiji ltd, striking a ten-year deal to supply flavanol cocoa powder to the business and its range of packaged goods. “What we have seen is that there’s a very large demand for real chocolate, not only with the flavours that they know and love, but they are also looking for food to play a bigger part in their health, and to make them feel different through caffeine or theobromine content.
“So, we see that there’s technology that can hit all these criteria for corporates and customers – and how can we make food more delicious and healthier at the same time. The use of plant-cell culture achieved those important benchmarks.” Notably, as Perlstein observed, one of the biggest obstacles to driving the company’s fortunes forward lies in gaining regulatory approval for its products, of which it is confident of concluding shortly. This will prove decisive in delivering its objectives of scaling-up its operations.
Significantly, he reflected that the venture has achieved some strong technical advances in its manufacturing that he felt will prove crucial for the company to see its fledgeling products hit shelves.
“We’re very excited to be able to take part in the World Confectionery Conference – we were waiting a while to hit some important milestones, but we now feel confident to showcase some of our new ingredients and the groundbreaking technologies that we are pioneering to market,” enthused the CEO of this year’s conference, where his colleague, Alex Shandrovsky will be leading its contribution to our event, which marks our title’s 90th anniversary within the sector.
Industry passion
As Alan explained, he has an immense passion for his work, which has stemmed from experience working specifically within confectionery, and the broader food industry, including starting a protein sweetener business. “My experience with that business, which had its own chocolates, gave me some insight into the industry in that it was due to go through some very rapid changes. It’s basically the same industry as it was 100 years ago, with the same issues it always had that are only getting worse with current global demand.
“The world’s population is ravenous for chocolate, and we saw an interesting time amid the changes within the industry, we could jump in and bring some novel technology that can allow not only many medium and large scale companies to produce chocolate, it can also be a new way of increasing its flavour and health properties, and eventually producing it for lower than commodity prices at scale, which we think will be a valuable proposition for customers and the wider industry.”
One of the most game-changing aspects of this form of production, he observed, was the fact that batches of cocoa could be produced in a matter of days, compared against ‘regular’ production methods – which poses a number of questions over just how its creation will play out relative to existing forms of manufacturing. While he acknowledges there are tests ahead in its journey, he firmly believes that its non-conventional, science-based route to creating chocolate can sit alongside traditional forms of cocoa farming, given the scale of supplies that are now being sought after on a truly global scale.
