CPI Signs On to €6.3M EU Cocoa Project Growing Cacao Cells in Bioreactors

The UK’s Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) has joined the COCO-AI project, a Horizon Europe programme aiming to produce cocoa and other high-value natural ingredients through plant cell culture and artificial intelligence. With €6.3 million in funding, this four-year project involves nine international partners from various industries and research organizations. The goal is to develop a platform that can be extended to other plant species to create sustainable and scalable production methods for ingredients used in food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics.

Plant cell culture involves growing plant cells in bioreactors under controlled conditions, a technique already used in commercial applications. AI tools will be used within COCO-AI to analyze data and refine cultivation conditions, speeding up process development and identifying commercial production routes. CPI will lead the scale-up work, developing manufacturing processes from pilot systems to demonstration scale. This will include assessing production costs, commercial viability, regulatory planning, and business model development to ensure the technology is reliable and economically feasible at a commercial scale.