If the price of Halloween candy gave you a fright at the checkout register last month, you weren’t imagining things. Driven by poor harvest, disease, and drought, a global shortage of cocoa beans is equating to record-high chocolate prices for consumers. In particular, the fungal disease called frosty pod rot has reduced crop yields, with Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana — the world’s top two producers — being particularly hard hit. In Mexico, longer dry seasons (as a result of climate change) negatively affected the formation of cocoa pods and impacted overall harvest. Altogether, these events caused global cocoa production to drop by about 14% in 2024.
Despite reaching a historically high price of over $12,000/m.t. in December 2024, cocoa prices fell below $8,000/m.t. in the third quarter of 2025, likely due to higher price points on market shelves shrinking consumer demand. A decline in sales volume may further exacerbate the supply-and-demand issue — leading chocolate products to become still more expensive for consumers.
Fortunately, companies like Yali Bio are researching what it might take to produce chocolate using fewer cocoa pods. The main hurdle is reproducing the triacylglycerols (TAGs) in cocoa butter. These dietary fats give chocolate its key functional properties, including its characteristic snap, melt profile, and smooth mouthfeel. Yali Bio’s proprietary platform uses engineered yeast and fermentation technology to produce the dominant TAGs in cocoa butter. “Rather than waiting months for a crop to grow and be harvested, targeted fats can be produced in a fermenter within days,” write the Yali Bio team in their article on pp. 26–33.
Dietary fats are essential in many of the foods we consume, and Yali Bio is harnessing their precision fermentation platform to replicate the fats found in butter, milk, and ice cream — to make vegan-friendly alternatives — and in human milk fat to improve the nutritional content of infant formulas.
The Special Section on pp. 17–39 covers many exciting examples of how industrial biotechnology is being used to make products more sustainably and efficiently — allowing supply chains to shift away from petroleum-based or potentially problematic feedstocks. The last time CEP covered Commercializing Industrial Biotechnology in a special section in June 2016 (nine years ago!), the majority of the articles focused on transforming raw biomass, like corn, into commodity chemicals like ethanol. Since then, strain development speed has increased exponentially, driven by advances in genetic and metabolic engineering, giving rise to a new reality where precision fermentation can be used to make a plethora of designer molecules at commercially relevant quantities at extraordinary speeds.
Although biotechnology has made impressive strides over the past decade — especially in shortening the time from concept to market — don’t expect Yali Bio’s cocoa butter alternative to reach store shelves in 2025. The company is completing regulatory steps for GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) approval and is just beginning partnership discussions with chocolate manufacturers. And while new innovations offer hope for a more sustainable and resilient chocolate supply in the future, experts say prices won’t stabilize in time for holiday shopping. Looks like it’s shaping up to be a hard candy Christmas this year.
Emily Petruzzelli, Editor-in-Chief
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