From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is Good Food.

It's the day after Valentine's Day, and I'm guessing a few of you still have some chocolate laying around.

According to the AI overlords that scour the internet on our behalf for answers,

Americans buy about 58 million pounds of chocolate on Valentine's Day each year. Who knows if that

estimate is correct, but the point is, it is a lot. It amounts to billions of dollars in chocolate

sales. But as we've reported in the past, nearly two-thirds of the world's cocoa beans are grown in West Africa,

where forests are cleared for farming and beans are often harvested by children or underpaid adults.

And as our appetite for cacao shows no signs of slowing, these downsides have forced some to look for an alternative.

Enter the tech sector. A handful of food tech companies have thrown their weight behind

lab-grown or cell-culture chocolate, and however you or I feel about lab-grown food, the idea

of petri dish chocolate is pretty fascinating. Good Foods,

Julia Child Fellow Gabrielle Glic visits California Cultured to find out how lab-grown chocolate is produced,

what it tastes like, and if it's coming for your Snickers bar anytime soon. California Cultured is headquartered in Sacramento.

Its lab is tucked away in a nondescript warehouse park.

All gray, no green.

It's hard to imagine they're growing anything here, let alone a tropical plant like cacao.

I met Alan Pearlstein, the company's founder, in a cafe right next to

the lab. Thank you. He was hard to miss. California cultured hat, California cultured shirt.

Alan's a food tech guy at heart and got his start working on cell culture, aka lab-grown meat, over 15 years ago.

Since then, he's worked in all sorts of cell-based food labs.

For him, the chocolate problem was like a nail, and cell culture, a hammer.

I sort of started cobbling together these processes and technologies to actually see, is this actually possible?

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