Silicon Valley Is Coming for Your Chocolate
The decadent smell of chocolate wafted my way. I approached the table in front of me, and a chef with a bushy mustache handed me a thimble of hot cocoa. I tipped it back, swirled the liquid around in my mouth, and swallowed: creamy and sweet. Next, a guy wearing a hat gave me a confection coated in chocolate. As I chewed, it melted in my mouth.
This was no candy factory. It was the basement of IndieBio, a synthetic-biology accelerator in San Francisco. Around me were booths offering vegan oils to replace bacon fat and chickpea-protein “chicken” legs that you held by the bone, which was a stick. None of the chocolate I had eaten was chocolate at all: It was produced in a lab by scientists at California Cultured, a start-up based in Davis, California.
What I tossed back in moments had taken a team of seven about 10 months to produce, Alan Perlstein, the company’s CEO, told me.
