Galy, a Boston biotech startup best known for growing cotton from plant cells, has moved into cocoa. Its new brand WunderHaus, a chocolate for professional kitchens, will make its commercial debut in December at the Boston restaurant Troquet on South, with other restaurants and hotels testing it for winter menus and a launch in the United Arab Emirates targeted for 2027.
The technology is plant cell culture: instead of growing a tree, Galy takes a small piece of a cocoa bean and multiplies its cells in brewery-style tanks. The harvested material is fermented and roasted outside the tanks and ground into cocoa powder, co-founder and chief executive Luciano Bueno told Green Queen. Production in Essex, Massachusetts, uses repurposed infrastructure and, he said, does not depend on climate, farmland or harvest cycles.
The pull came from chocolate makers hit by the climate crisis. Cocoa stocks fell to a decade low in 2024 and prices hit a record, as extreme weather damaged harvests in the main producing regions. Bueno said Galy took cocoa from the lab to commercial scale in under a year after focusing on it in 2025, sharing about 80% of the process with its cotton work.
For now WunderHaus is a hybrid: Galy's cultured cocoa is combined with conventionally sourced cocoa, priced like premium chocolate, and the company says it is exploring partnerships with cocoa farmers in Africa and Latin America and intends to complement farming, not replace it. It has self-affirmed its cocoa powder as Generally Recognized as Safe in the US and notified the Food and Drug Administration, has applied to Abu Dhabi's food safety authority, and may seek EU novel food approval in 2027-28.
Galy has not yet done a life-cycle assessment for cocoa; its preliminary internal estimate is a reduction in resource use of around 80% or more against field production, which it says still needs validation. Its cotton, by its own analysis, uses 99% less water and 97% less land. Other startups in cell-cultured cocoa include Food Brewer, Kokomodo, California Cultured and Celleste Bio, and Barry Callebaut is exploring the technology too.
The report is by Anay Mridul for Green Queen. The image is Galy's.
Source: Green Queen
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