California Cultured
California Cultured is a Food Ingredients & Functional company founded in 2020 and based in West Sacramento, United States. It has raised $16M in total funding, most recently a Venture.
California Cultured was founded in 2020 by Alan Perlstein and Harrison Yoon to produce cocoa, and eventually coffee, from plant cell cultures grown in bioreactors rather than from farmed crops. Its cacao cells grow in condition-controlled tanks that mimic the rainforest, yielding cocoa with high flavanol content while avoiding the deforestation, labor and price-volatility problems of conventional cocoa. The company has demonstrated cell culture in large bioreactors and opened a facility in West Sacramento, scaling biomanufacturing with partners including Pow.Bio, and has raised roughly $16 million plus grant support from the National Science Foundation and BioMADE. It has worked on cell-based chocolate and high-flavanol products with confectionery majors Meiji and Puratos.
California Cultured is a leading test of whether plant-cell-cultured cocoa can scale economically, offering a deforestation-free, price-stable alternative as cocoa shortages and record prices strain the chocolate industry.
cacultured.com ↗·Food Ingredients & Functional·
United States·private 
