Before we get started, Michal Beressi Golomb warns that if the alarm sounds, the interview will need to stop immediately. The siren indicates a missile threat coming over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and means she’ll need to relocate to a shelter.
It can happen at any hour, day or night, and it does. Operating on minimal sleep from the night before, the CEO of cultivated cocoa ingredients start-up Celleste Bio had been pulled away from her desk just two hours prior to our video call – again, by the sound of an impending missile.
We don’t have a routine. You can’t plan anything, and you need to stay close to a shelter.
Michal Beressi Golomb, CEO, Celleste Bio
But today’s not a typical day in the life of Golomb, nor in the life of the start-up she’s been heading up for the past three years. And whether in times of conflict or peace, the mission remains the same. Celleste Bio is working to transform one of the world’s most beloved confections – chocolate – before conventional cocoa cultivation is pushed beyond repair.
A chef, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, an investor
It’s not uncommon to come across scientist CEOs in the world of biotech. Develop a technology, decide to commercialise it, and then lead the resulting business venture – it’s a well‑trodden path. But that’s far from the route Golomb took on her way to heading up Celleste Bio, a start-up backed by the likes of chocolate giant Mondelēz International.
Coming from a family of chefs – Golomb’s Greek grandfather opened a restaurant in Israel’s early days – a love of food is in her DNA. Trained as a fine-dining chef, Golomb learnt the “craft of building flavour and texture” from raw ingredients.
From kitchens to offices, the now-CEO moved into law, entrepreneurship and investment. “I switched industries many times,” she tells me. “Often, I asked: ‘what am I doing with my life?’” But the comment’s made in jest. It’s clear she loves the excitement of new challenges.
After moving into venture capital, she “caught the start‑up fever” – and that’s where she finds herself now: a foodie with a penchant for chocolate (she’s open to bribes involving dark chocolate and sea salt) in the start-up world, working with a lesser-known ingredient she’s convinced can make or break chocolate.
For Golomb, it all starts with a crucial component. “Cocoa butter is not just an ingredient,” she stresses. “It’s magic.”
What’s so magic about cocoa butter?
“When you’re a chef, you understand very quickly that cocoa butter is what makes chocolate.”
Yes, for Golomb and her cocoa butter-loving team at Celleste Bio, the fat element in chocolate is quite simply “everything”. It gives chocolate its unique melt profile, its “snappiness”, its shine, and importantly, its “feeling on the palate”.
It’s a question of quality, she explains. “Cocoa butter determines the texture, the melt and mouthfeel. There’s nothing else in food that behaves quite like it.”
If cocoa butter defines chocolate’s taste and texture, cultivated cocoa butter pushes the boundaries of what food biotechnology can achieve.
The Celleste Bio team starts off with a single cocoa bean, which it cuts open and places in a Petri dish. When cells start to grow on the bean, the scientists take the cells and ferment them with water, sugar and vitamins. “We give them the media they need to feel like they’re on a tree,” she says.
This process enables biomass to grow. Today, the team separates the butter from the powder, but in the future it expects to add cocoa mass (a mixture of cocoa butter and powder) to its pipeline of ingredients.
The urgency of developing cultivated chocolate ingredients
The science is impressive. But without a clear need – from industry or consumers – bleeding‑edge innovations can sometimes prompt a lingering sense of “so what?”
In the case of cocoa, that question is easily answered. Cocoa is in crisis, and cultivated cocoa plugs an obvious and growing production gap. For two years, volatility in cocoa prices has upended the chocolate sector, with shortages forcing companies to reformulate products to reduce their reliance on an increasingly expensive ingredient.
Over a five to ten-year horizon, cultivated cocoa is not just interesting – it’s necessary.
Michal Beressi Golomb, CEO, Celleste Bio
But for Golomb, it’s about much more than price. “We have a serious supply issue – it’s a structural collapse in cocoa supply. What we’re witnessing is not a market cycle. It’s ageing farms, climate disruption, disease, deforestation regulation, shrinking arable land.
“The 2024 price shock forced this issue onto CEO desks. And those conversations don’t just disappear.”
The issue is compounded by growing demand for cocoa, which for Golomb, makes the development of cell-based cocoa a must. “There’s no solution on the traditional supply side that closes the gap,” she reasons. “Over a five to ten-year horizon, cultivated cocoa is not just interesting – it’s necessary."
And it’s not about replacing conventional cocoa completely. The answer lies in supplementing a squeezed industry. “Cocoa has sustained millions of families for generations. That’s worth protecting.”
Cell-based cocoa simply fills the shortage gap, she says. “It keeps real cocoa on the table so companies don’t abandon chocolate completely.”
Biggest roadblocks to cell-based cocoa sales
Celleste Bio has already debuted the world’s first chocolate-grade cultivated cocoa butter publicly, and is moving from lab to pilot scale. A 1,000-litre pilot facility is currently being finalised, and the start-up’s secured Mondelēz as a “strategic design partner”.
If all goes well, it’s expected Celleste Bio will achieve commercial readiness next year, with first samples being provided to potential customers in the coming months. So far, so good.
But like any food biotech company, the road to commercialisation is often peppered with hurdles. Some are bigger than others – and sometimes the biggest lie in regulation.
Regulation needs to be named as one of the most urgent bottlenecks
Michal Beressi Golomb, CEO, Celleste Bio
No cell-based cocoa product has achieved pre-market approval to date. Celleste Bio is preparing dossiers for the US, EU, Israel and the UK. But at the same time, it’s a small start-up, and applications are demanding of time and resources.
“Regulation needs to be named as one of the most urgent bottlenecks,” says Golomb, who believes the process could be significantly helped by regulators and innovators working together to accelerate to-market pathways.
Once on the market, there’s also the question of consumer appetite. Do shoppers want to buy cell-based cocoa? If cultivated meat’s anything to go by, it’s far from a sure thing.
It would be a mistake to compare the two, believes Golomb. “The dynamics are different. Cocoa is a plant, so there’s no animal welfare issue, and since our ingredients are B2B, consumers will just eat great chocolate. Chemically, it’s the same. It’s not a substitute, it’s real cocoa.”
The ‘roller coaster’ of cultivated cocoa development
The life of any start-up, and of any start-up CEO, is always up and down. There are good days and bad days, admits Golomb. “It’s a roller coaster.”
On the good days, the biology behaves as predicted; the cells are healthy; the chocolate maker tastes the product and can’t tell the difference between cell-based and conventional cocoa.
“A good day is being with the team; brilliant people who believe in the mission and show up, even with the missiles. That energy is rare.”
On the truly terrible days, the team is met with unwelcome surprises. Perhaps geopolitics gets in the way of innovation, and work comes to a standstill while sirens blare overhead, communicating the very real threat of missile attack. Or perhaps the cells don’t behave as expected, and hours are spent attempting to understand why.
“Biology is humbling. You need patience,” admits Golomb. Of course, that can be hard to come by when faced with the pressing need of cocoa supply. “But again, what makes those days bearable is the team and our mission. The terrible days are when you see most clearly what your team is made of, and that never disappoints.”
