Prices and harvests for chocolate, olive oil, and coffee crops are growing increasingly volatile as climate change buffets their delicate growing zones.
As these foods verge on climate extinction, some biotech firms may offer answers.
Using microbes, we can now produce convincing substitutes and exact replicas for even chemically complex substances like chocolate.
What’s more, these fermented foodstuffs often require a fraction of the land and water needed for conventional agriculture.
What exactly do microbes offer our climate-wracked food systems?
Cooking oils: from grove to laboratory
The Mediterranean landscape and the olive tree go hand in hand. It was until recently one of the crops best suited to the arid South European and Levantine hills.
Now, this emblem of Mediterranean culture is under threat. Already, supermarket oil prices have skyrocketed to unimaginable levels as supply runs to a trickle.
Soon, summer temperatures in Southern Europe and the Middle East will scorch their fruit and flowers, leaving them unable to reproduce. Scientists are also finding evidence that a warmer world is increasing levels of bacteria that damage olive trees.
The case of olive trees shows that the ongoing climate catastrophe will at the same time be a social and cultural one: In places like Lebanon, a 6000 year-old olive industry will grind to a halt. With rising temperatures locked in, olive growers, pressers, and distributors will be immediate casualties.
In a new climate, olive oil will be a scarce commodity. Yet their nearest cousins, culinary oils made from vegetables, are not necessarily a solution. Apart from the very different flavour profiles, these land-hungry vegetable crops are ill-suited to the drought-ridden new world we are entering.
Cultured oil from sugarcane
Biotech firms are now trying to develop climate-aware culinary oils fitted to the resource pressures of a climate in flux.
The novel cooking oil garnering most attention right now is the all-purpose Cultured Oil by Zero Acre Farms, which is vying to become a kitchen staple in the century of climate change.
Manufacturing Cultured Oil needs two important inputs: the feedstock is sugarcane while the processing technology is bacteria. Bacteria eat and convert raw sugar from sugarcane ferments inside tanks over a few days, turning out the target oil.
The process for making Cultured Oil is not precision fermentation, where microbes are programmed to make exact replicas of target substances, but it is still an example of fermentation since it uses microbes to transform raw materials.
Zero Acres makes bold claims about why Cultured Oil is less environmentally impactful than every other major farmed kitchen oil, mostly derived from vegetable crops.
According to the startup, Cultured Oil needs almost 100% less water to produce than olive oil, which is a notoriously thirsty crop. Zero Acre also says its product requires 85% less land than canola oil (which comes from rapeseed) as well as 86% less carbon dioxide than soybean-based oils.
Zero Acre also says that its product is more conducive to maintaining healthy, fertile soils. Sugarcane is a perennial grass, not an annual vegetable, meaning harvesting sugarcane is like “mowing the lawn instead of ripping a plant out of the soil every year”.
The big market that Cultured Oil is looking to take is that for palm oil, the biggest cooking oil in the world by market share. Zero Acre claims that its oil is just as productive as palm oil when it comes to oil yield per acre. However, it comes without the negative biodiversity impacts of palm oil, a major driver of deforestation globally.
Zero Acre says its claims about deforestation are backed by a service that uses satellite imagery to verify land use around its sugarcane feedstock. The images, which are drawn from over the last 20 years, are meant to confirm that the areas of cultivation were not recently converted from forests.
Chipotle, keen to be seen as adopting climate-friendly ingredients, is now an investor in the oil startup with a $50 million venture fund, Cultivate Next. The company plans to use it on R&D, cost reductions, and new products.
Cooking oils from the deep
Right now, the fermented cooking oil sector is small and Zero Acres dominates the media coverage. However, sugarcane does not exhaust the feedstock possibilities here.
A startup looking beyond land-based crops for novel cooking oil is the US-based Algae Cooking Club (ACC) which claims it has developed an ‘everything oil’ with a high heat point. The product is made inside the bodies of microalgae in vats. By the end of the process, these organisms will be around 80% oil by body weight, according to the company.
The ACC is selling their algae product as being not only sustainable but healthful too. The oil is lower in unhealthy saturated fats than many types of olive oil while having higher levels of healthy monounsaturated fats.
Its Chef Grade Algae Cooking Oil is already on the market for both consumers and wholesalers, with the brand pushing the product as something that can replace olive oil even in restaurant kitchens for taste and functionality.
Waking up without coffee?
Waking up to a world without coffee is unimaginable for the 1 billion consumers of the bean, a stimulant popular since coffee culture first flourished in 15th century Yemen.
Coffee bean production is now extremely vulnerable to climate change as it only grows in thin, ecologically fragile bands around the equator. Human-driven warming is erasing these delicately balanced environments, bringing new pests and droughts.
Climate change effects are already having seismic shocks on the global coffee markets. Over the last two years, poor harvests and speculative hoarding by traders led to skyrocketing market prices. Vietnam’s 2024/25 robusta coffee crop dropped 20% year-on-year.
Compound Foods, a San Francisco startup, has developed what they call a ‘beanless coffee’. Their coffee is tree-less too. Their custom microbes, grown in a vat, eat simple inputs and spit out coffee beans.
Interestingly, the startup was founded by Costa Rica-born Maricel Saenz whose country of birth is one of the top coffee bean producers.
Maricel’s motivation was not solely to save the market for coffee beans from climate change. She also saw an opening for a product that could help reduce the pollution involved in making conventional coffee.
Precision fermentation, especially for immensely complex compounds that make coffee taste the way it does, is still a high-cost, high-capital manufacturing process. Compound Goods has so far received $5.3 million seed funding to date but it will have to refine mass manufacturing techniques for it to become widely available.
Chocolate without the guilt
Chocolate completes the triad of iconic culinary staples most at risk of climate extinction.
Like the coffee bean, the cacao plant can only thrive on very limited areas of the earth’s surface. Climate change is throwing these out of balance and tearing up the global market, with cocoa futures hitting a 45 year-high in 2023.
The pressure to produce the bean as cheaply as possible for global markets has meant that the crop is also a major contributor to climate change and habitat loss in countries like Ghana and the Ivory Coast which dominate cultivation.
Dark chocolate is according to some estimates the most carbon intensive food to produce per kilogram thanks to the carbon-absorbing habitats destroyed to make way for the cacao farms.
Planet A Foods (formerly QOA) is using microbes to produce chocolate without the environmental impacts and vulnerabilities. It is the biggest name in precision fermented chocolate right now, producing ChoViva Concentrate and ChoViva Butter, ingredients for making cocoa-free chocolate.
A world without farms?
The new crop of fermented food products will be cold comfort to people whose livelihoods depend on agriculture.
Some of the immediate casualties will include olive growers and pressers from Portugal to Palestine but also, as in the case of the West African cocoa growers, entire national GDPs that depend on a single crop.
What purpose then, should microbially produced foodstuffs serve in a climate-wracked world? The most important role for these cocoa, oil, and chocolate startups is as testing grounds for scaling precision fermented manufacturing.
As the 21st century progresses, we will need to explore all possible avenues for producing accessible foods with low environmental impacts.
Precision fermentation could be a key plank of food security and the startups described here are refining methods for achieving cost-effective processes such as for strain development and efficient harvesting.
The challenge from here is how and whether advances in precision fermentation and other novel food industries will benefit traditional producers already being hit by climate impacts.
