016: Chocolate to Love: How Cell-Culture is Creating a Healthier Treat with Alan Perlstein

Essential Ingredients Podcast

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“The three main factors are taste, price, and availability. Make sure things taste amazing, make sure it's affordable, and make it even more healthy.” —Alan Perlstein

Cell-culture technology is unlocking new frontiers in food production by growing crops from single cells instead of plants. This novel approach allows us to see a new generation of "designer" foods engineered at the cellular level to promote wellness in tasty new ways.

California Culture is pioneering the use of cell culture to grow cocoa and coffee from single cells, allowing them to produce chocolate and coffee with unprecedented health benefits. By cultivating cocoa cells in bioreactors, they can infuse chocolate with high levels of heart-healthy cocoa flavanols while removing lead and other toxins. Their vision is to make chocolate not only more delicious but also a secret weapon for cardiovascular health.

Listen in as California Culture CEO, Alan Perlstein shares how his background in biotechnology and entrepreneurship led him to this innovative idea, the health benefits of cocoa flavanols, and his vision to make chocolate healthier and more sustainable through this technology. Justine and Alan also talk about the potential of cellular agriculture in improving the food industry, the process of scaling your biz from lab to market, expanding distribution, making products more affordable, guiding principles for product development, and more.

Meet Alan:

Alan started working in a tiny cell-cultured fish lab in Long Island 17 years ago, back in the early days of cell-culture technology. He launched his first food tech company Joywell Foods (formerly Miraculex), where he commercialized protein-sweetened foods. When he saw tension brewing between the huge demand for chocolate and the sustainable/ethical issues surrounding it, he knew he had to look towards something bigger and thus, California Cultured was born.

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