Climate safe chocolate could start in a lab.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Extreme weather caused by climate change is affecting agriculture and raising the cost of foods like coffee, olive oil, and chocolate.

Coco prices have been hitting record highs due to extreme rainfall, drought, and heat.

And some experts say most of the land used for cocoa production won't be usable in the

future. Marketplace's Amy Scott, host of our podcast, How We Survive, explores a new way

tech entrepreneurs are making chocolate so that we can keep enjoying it for years to come.

I'm in West Sacramento, California,

visiting a company called California Cultured,

where they make chocolate out of cocoa cells.

No plants required.

Safety glasses, we don't need them?

Yes, we actually do.

Good call.

CEO Alan Perlstein is showing me around.

We sort of wrangle the cells and make them do what we want in this part of the lap.

By wrangle, Pearlstein says they're actually sort of tricking the cells to only grow the tissues they want, targeting certain compounds, flavors, and fats. Part of how they do

that is by feeding the cells certain mixtures of food, like sugar and plant extracts. Pearlstein

opens up a retrofitted pizza fridge with racks for stacking pans of pizza. Only instead of

pizza, there are trays of petri dishes filled with

tiny brown blobs. They look like little like boogers, basically. I don't know how else to describe this.

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