CPI joins €6.3m Horizon Europe project to help future-proof cocoa production

Chocolate, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics may have little in common, but they all depend on a reliable supply of high-value natural ingredients. Climate change, crop disease and increasingly fragile global supply chains are placing growing pressure on the production of many natural ingredients. Cocoa is among the crops most affected, with extreme weather and declining yields contributing to supply shortages and price volatility. 

To help address these challenges, COCO-AI unites a unique consortium of nine international partners from across the globe, bringing together expertise from industry, academia, and research and technology organisations to explore how engineering biology, plant cell culture, and artificial intelligence (AI) can create more resilient ways to produce high-value natural ingredients. The €6.3 million Horizon Europe project will use cocoa as its first demonstrator, before applying the platform to eight additional plant species, generating knowledge that could support the sustainable production of a much broader range of natural ingredients. 

Plant cell culture is an emerging area of engineering biology that enables the production of valuable natural compounds by cultivating plant cells directly in bioreactors under carefully controlled conditions, rather than growing whole crops. AI will help researchers analyse complex biological and manufacturing data to optimise cultivation conditions, accelerate process development and identify commercially viable production methods more quickly. Together, these technologies have the potential to complement conventional agriculture while helping build more resilient and sustainable supply chains. 

One of the biggest challenges facing emerging manufacturing technologies is demonstrating that they can operate reliably, consistently and economically at an industrial scale. This is where CPI’s expertise will play a critical role. 

Drawing on experience in bioprocess development and scale-up, CPI will lead process scale-up activities, developing manufacturing processes from 50L pilot systems through to 10,000L demonstration scale. CPI will also lead techno-economic assessments to evaluate production costs and commercial viability, while supporting life-cycle assessment, regulatory planning and business model development to help de-risk industrial adoption and provide manufacturers with greater confidence to invest in plant cell culture technologies. 

Kris Wadrop, Managing Director – Materials at CPI, said:

“Plant cell culture has the potential to transform how high-value natural ingredients are produced, creating manufacturing systems that are more resilient, more sustainable and less dependent on increasingly vulnerable agricultural supply chains. 

“Scientific innovation alone is not enough. For technologies like this to make a real impact, they must be shown to work reliably and economically at commercial scale. Through COCO-AI, we’re applying CPI’s expertise in process development, scale-up and commercialisation to help bridge the gap between innovation in the lab and industrial manufacturing, giving businesses greater confidence to adopt these emerging technologies.” 

Over the next 4 years, the consortium will demonstrate industrial-scale cultivation of cocoa cells, develop new cocoa-derived ingredient formulations and prototype products, and release open-source AI tools, datasets and methodologies to help accelerate wider adoption of plant cell culture technologies across research and industry. If successful, the project could strengthen Europe’s biomanufacturing capabilities by helping manufacturers access more resilient supplies of high-value natural ingredients while reducing reliance on climate-sensitive supply chains.