Vice President of Science and Technology at California Cultured
Steven Lang serves as the Vice President of Science and Technology at California Cultured, where he utilizes plant cell culture to create sustainable and ethical chocolate and coffee. Prior to this role, he was the Vice President of Bioprocess at Upside Foods, where he focused on developing cultured chicken products.
Human Transcribed
Dr. Steven Lang:
Two billion people across the globe every day consume coffee or chocolate. We're destroying essentially carbon sinks and biodiversity to create this commodity. What I'm thinking about is that we're really going to try to rebuild our food system into a more sustainable system. A cornerstone of that will be plant cell culture because we can do it more efficiently.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Alongside environmental concerns, coffee and cocoa production are also linked to unfair wages for farmers.
Micah Schweizer:
So what is plant cell culture, and how will its products help address some of the fundamental issues with industrial agriculture?
Chai Nussbaumer:
In this episode, we're returning to the world of cultivated food. We'll explore the work of California Cultured, a startup creating chocolate and coffee in the lab.
Micah Schweizer:
We'll look into the science behind this cultivation, hear more about the impacts of cocoa and coffee farming, and hear just how futuristic this technology could actually get.
Chai Nussbaumer:
I'm Chai Nussbaumer.
Micah Schweizer:
And I'm Micah Schweitzer. This is Balancing the Future from METTLER TOLEDO.
Chai Nussbaumer:
On this show, we delve into the world of science and technology and explore the solutions that are transforming our lives.
Micah Schweizer:
So Steve, it's so nice to have you back on Balancing the Future. You are actually our very first guest on the show, season one, episode one. And when we spoke back in 2024, you were focusing on cultivated meat, growing animal cells in bioreactors. Now you're cultivating coffee and cocoa in bioreactors.
Dr. Steven Lang:
Well, Micah, it's great to be back on the show. The big transition for me was essentially the job opportunity, and seeing that plant cell culture is really going to help us move the needle and have some of the impact that cellular agriculture has promised the world and has of yet not really been able to deliver. And I hope through this conversation, I can really kind of convince you that plant cell culture can really help us commoditize cell culture and bring these products, not just food, but other types of products to the market to help us really kind of build a sustainable food system.
Micah Schweizer:
Just for the sake of definitions, cellular agriculture, can you tell us what that means?
Dr. Steven Lang:
Yeah. So that's been really an abused terminology in my perspective because there are really three different pillars of cellular agriculture. You have cultivated meat, which has been the best known and gotten the most publicity and what I was working with before where you actually take a biopsy from an agriculturally relevant animal and then grow those cells in a bioreactor to create a facsimile of meat. But then there is also precision fermentation, which is using microbes to produce proteins of interest that will be products. So you can think of like lactoferrin from milk or casein for making animal-free cheese all coming from precision fermentation, which has been done for a very long time. And then the last pillar is of course something that's been flying under the radar for many, many years, which is plant cell cultures. It's exactly the same idea as cultivated meat where you're taking a biopsy or in the case of plants, we call it an explant and you induce it to grow and you can basically because of the genetics of plants, get them to grow either in suspension or to create an entirely new plant.
And this is the work that I think is really exciting because there are so many advantages to plant cell culture, and not only the products that it can produce but how it's produced will allow us to really kind of move the technology as well as then impact on consumer demand and consumer acceptance because of the products that we're producing like cocoa and coffee and saffron and things like that.
Chai Nussbaumer:
So now everyone really loves the rich taste of chocolate, the smooth texture, a nice strong cup of coffee in the morning. So I assume that's not the only reason you chose to focus on lab cultivated coffee and cocoa because you're a big fan. What was the reason for that?
Dr. Steven Lang:
Those two products are beloved and two billion people across the globe every day consume coffee or chocolate. So the total accessible market is huge, but then getting back to the technology, California Cultured has really kind of built its name around these two products as well as then innovating around the biomanufacturing processes to reduce the cost. So that was the part that was really exciting to me, because my career spanning from biopharmaceuticals all the way into food has always been, how can we get these products to the market cheaply and quickly? That's where I think these plant cell cultures are really going to be a benefit in that we can produce them cheaply in low cost infrastructure, and then get these products that consumers are already excited about into their hands so they can see that there is identical to conventional cocoa and coffee.
Micah Schweizer:
What's the benefit to moving to cellular agriculture and away from say a coffee plantation or a cocoa plantation?
Dr. Steven Lang:
Well, I mean if we take a holistic approach, we're going to need either between 50% to 70% more food for the globe as our population grows, and that's by 2050. Conventional agriculture and innovation around conventional agriculture cannot fill that gap. So we need to really double down on not only what we're doing today with conventional agriculture, which has been industrialized across most of the world, but also then really pay attention to innovative ideas where we can fill those gaps in our food systems so that we avoid malnutrition and starvation, of course. And cocoa and coffee are really a great example, because it's a way for consumers to get something that they love and advances technology. And by using plants, we can actually drive those costs down to make it comparable to conventional agriculture, and also then think about how can we produce new products that will be either safer or healthier.
So one of the things about agriculture and cocoa, those plants accumulate heavy metals from the soil. And so you can see from consumer reports, about a third of chocolate products contain heavy metals, and heavy metals have a dramatic impact on children's neurological systems as they're developing, and of course kids love to eat chocolate. So with our product, we're able to reduce the heavy metal content to almost zero just because we're able to control the inputs into the fermentator or the bioreactors as the cells are growing and they're not accumulating those heavy metals. The other part of it is that we can actually make this healthier. So our cell line is producing the bioactive compound that makes eating dark chocolate healthy. That compound is called flavonol and our flavonol concentrations are about 60 times higher than conventional cocoa. So you can envision a product that is making chocolate where there are high flavonol contents, which is giving a health benefit to the consumer, as well as it's much safer.
Chai Nussbaumer:
So in terms of the gaps that you mentioned, can you speak to some of the root causes of these gaps? There's a lot of agricultural issues and perhaps some human rights issues that come into play.
Dr. Steven Lang:
Yeah, cocoa and coffee are grown only around the equator. And here in the United States, the only place that we can grow coffee is in Hawaii and maybe Puerto Rico. So all of those countries that are traditionally growing cocoa are essentially very small farms, family farms, and they take and cut down rainforest to create those farms. And so that is the first problem. We're destroying essentially carbon sinks and biodiversity to create this commodity. And then the second part of it is that those farmers are actually not benefiting from those farms. So back in the 1980s, the profit margin for a cocoa farmer was around 16%, and today it is between 3% and 6%. So those farmers are basically left in extreme poverty and that then results into encouraging children to work on the farms. And in fact, in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, there's something like 1.5 million children working on those farms. So that is a significant concern for people.
Micah Schweizer:
But how will moving a portion of the production of coffee or cocoa out of these farms and into the lab benefit these farmers?
Dr. Steven Lang:
It won't necessarily. And then of course, just like the cultivated meat space, the demand for coffee and cocoa is so high that in the beginning we're going to have a very small impact as we ramp and scale our production. But over time, what we hope will happen is that those farmers will then find other crops to grow and hopefully reduce the amount of rainforest that this cut down for that.
Micah Schweizer:
So crops that don't require the felling of rainforests, for instance?
Dr. Steven Lang:
Exactly.
Micah Schweizer:
You mentioned carbon sinks as well, that we're losing those. So more broadly, when you talk about cellular agriculture, what's the climate change connection?
Dr. Steven Lang:
When we do a life cycle assessment of our processes, we're able to do or create the same product with lower energy inputs. So essentially what we're saying is that for example, to create a cup of coffee, it takes about 140 liters of water. To create a kilo of cocoa, it takes something like 1,700 liters. So the traditional agriculture is relatively inefficient. And what we're trying to do is build efficient processes to use limited resources to produce the same products that we all love and care for.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Hey, Micah.
Micah Schweizer:
Hey, Chai.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Micah, did you know that California Cultured recently developed a portable plastic bioreactor that's scalable? It's also much cheaper than the stainless steel ones typically used in cultivated meat production.
Micah Schweizer:
Interesting. So what do they look like, and how are they different from the steel ones?
Chai Nussbaumer:
Well, they're not all that exciting to look at. Basically, they're long plastic drums that can hold about 1,600 liters of cell culture, which is twice the volume of any competitor right now.
Micah Schweizer:
Okay. So kind of like a big opaque water cooler you definitely wouldn't want to drink from.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Exactly. But in terms of costs, they're around US$3,000 to build compared with roughly half a million dollars for the traditional stainless steel version.
Micah Schweizer:
Okay. And because they're cheap and portable, I imagine then there's potential for them to be used much more locally?
Chai Nussbaumer:
Theoretically, yes. Local coffee roasters already have their own roasting techniques and blends. So why not have a bioreactor there too where they could produce their own coffee?
Micah Schweizer:
That's pretty sci-fi. And I was thinking back to what Steven said about water use. Do these portable low cost bioreactors help reduce the figure of 140 liters of water per cup of coffee?
Dr. Steven Lang:
So the nice thing about plant cell culture is that we can get to very high yields. So when we talk about yields in cell culture, it's in a packed cell volume. And with plant cell culture in a relatively non-optimized process, we can get about 30% packed cell volume for every liter. Contrast that to animal cell culture, where after a lot of work, you may be able to get to 10% to 20%. So right off the bat, our processes are much more efficient in their water usage as well as in consumption of all the nutrients that we put into the media.
Chai Nussbaumer:
So let's go back a little bit to the rich taste and smooth texture of coffee and really the satisfying aromas here. How do you gain customer acceptance, and what similarities are there with your product or potential products to products already existing in the market?
Dr. Steven Lang:
In our regulatory filing, we're saying this is interchangeable with conventional cocoa, and the same will be for coffee. While cultivated meat has gotten a lot of resistance not only from the industry, the meat production industry, but also consumers just in food neophobia, the fear of new food, because it is a little bit strange to be able to produce a whole cut meat from a bioreactor. On the other hand, with cultivated or plant cell culture products that we're talking about today, it looks very similar to the conventional product and the coffee we produce just looks like coffee that you would buy from conventional agriculture. So it's not only the appearance, but then also the components within. So we're seeing essentially the identical componentry in cocoa powder that we're seeing, and that's particularly important around the fats that we have. We have exactly the same fats that you see in Theobroma cacao grown beans.
And likewise with coffee, we're getting not only the flavors we're able to develop those flavors, but we're also getting caffeine. So that's important, because once we can see that we're getting caffeine there, we can start thinking about what are the biological levers we can pull to either have a decaffeinated cup or a full strength cup.
Chai Nussbaumer:
I'm sure there will be a lot of taste tests going on, and this is something that no one will say no to.
Dr. Steven Lang:
Exactly. Well, along those lines, of course, it requires a lot of food science to develop those flavors, and we have a very strong analytical chemist who is helping us with that. And over the last year we've seen our cup of coffee develop immensely from something that was really unpalatable. Now we've got it to the point where it's tasting like a very nice good cup of coffee.
Micah Schweizer:
So not cocoa beans, but cocoa powder is coming directly from the reactor?
Dr. Steven Lang:
Right. Well, so let me explain the process a little bit further. So in the beginning, what we've done is we've taken and opened up a Theobroma cacao pod and taken those explants or biopsies from the beans. We induce those to grow indefinitely on solid auger, and then that's when we select for different cell lines and flavor attributes or different phenotypes of those cells. We then can adapt them to grow into suspension. And then once we have them in suspension, we can grow them like any other cell, either a microbe or an animal cell in a bioreactor. At the end of that production run in a bioreactor, we basically harvest all of the biomass, and then we dry it, mill it and package it. So that's the other beautiful thing about plant cell culture is that the downstream processing is very simple, and the component or the biomass is the product, and so you have a very clean label at the end.
Micah Schweizer:
So what does it look like when it comes out of a bioreactor?
Dr. Steven Lang:
A little bit like sand, because what you're looking at are aggregates of cells so they've clumped together, and then when we separate them, the spent media, we can dewater them.
And then go right into drying. And throughout it does really look like cocoa and coffee, but it really gets to the point of when we grind it or mill it, then it really does look like the original.
Chai Nussbaumer:
And will the cost of the end products be similar to conventional products?
Dr. Steven Lang:
That is a goal. So there is still a lot of science and engineering that we need to do to drive those costs down. But the nice thing is because we're producing this high flavonol cocoa powder to begin with that's a healthy type, we're actually going after our premium market. So we're able to charge a bit more than what conventional cocoa powder would be, but it's for a specific purpose and we're going to then use those profits once we get onto the market in 2027 to then start beating down the cost of production through our innovative BioActor and of course increasing or decreasing the cost of the raw materials that we are putting into the bioreactor. So we're going to be able to reach price parity with conventional cocoa probably around 2028.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Wow. And are there any other foods that you would consider to be great candidates for cellular agriculture?
Dr. Steven Lang:
There's a lot of examples out there already. In Europe, there is an apple cell culture process that is going into cosmetics. I have a good colleague who's worked with me at California Cultured who started our own company now called Krokos Bio. She is producing saffron, and that's a great product because saffron is about $3,000 a kilogram, so really a premium product. And then there are other companies that are working in the cocoa space and coffee space as well as in any type of plant material you can envision, ginger, asparagus, flavors and fragrances, cosmetics. Plants can do a lot of different things that maybe animal cells cannot do.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Now let's look into the future a little bit. And can you estimate what needs to happen to further scale up cultivated plant production? And for instance, do you see a future where you can work together with chocolate producers?
Dr. Steven Lang:
Absolutely. So yeah, I don't see a limit of scaling with plant cell culture just because of the technology needed to grow the cells are a little bit easier, that is you don't need stainless steel and steam to sterilize the vessels. And then I would love it to see us working with traditional chocolatiers and cocoa producers to produce new products. And one of the things that we can do with ours is really kind of modify the flavor profile in a way, either through the cell culture or downstream processing to create new products. And that's what's exciting for me, especially if you start thinking about taking other plant cell culture products, maybe a strawberry, or even saffron, let's use saffron, and co-culture those cells, saffron and cocoa together to get a new flavor profile. This is all very intriguing for me. And I just really want to encourage entrepreneurs and scientists and engineers out there to start looking for gaps in our food systems and how can plant cell culture fill those gaps.
So what I'm thinking about is that we're really going to try to rebuild our food system into a more sustainable system. A cornerstone of that will be plant cell culture because we can do it more efficiently. And then more importantly, we can grow products that are not traditionally grown in the United States through these processes, and we can do it cheaper.
Chai Nussbaumer:
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Micah Schweizer:
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Chai Nussbaumer:
If you found this episode interesting, why not listen to our first interview with Steven?
Micah Schweizer:
It's linked in the show notes, or you can scroll right to the beginning of our feed straight back to our very first episode to hear all about cultivated meat production.
Chai Nussbaumer:
Also, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
