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The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) has joined a €6.3 million Horizon Europe project investigating how engineering biology and artificial intelligence (AI) could help create more resilient and sustainable supply chains for high-value natural ingredients.
The four-year COCO-AI project brings together nine international partners from industry, academia and research and technology organisations. The consortium will initially focus on cocoa before applying the technologies developed to eight additional plant species.
Cocoa has been selected as the project's first demonstrator amid growing concerns over the impact of extreme weather, crop disease and supply chain disruption on production. Declining yields and supply shortages have contributed to significant volatility in cocoa prices in recent years, highlighting the vulnerability of conventional agricultural supply chains.
COCO-AI will explore plant cell culture as an alternative approach to producing valuable natural compounds. The technology involves cultivating plant cells directly in bioreactors under controlled conditions, rather than relying solely on the cultivation of whole crops.
AI will be used to analyse biological and manufacturing data, helping researchers optimise cultivation conditions, accelerate process development and identify commercially viable production methods.
The approach is intended to complement conventional agriculture and could ultimately support more resilient supply chains for natural ingredients used across sectors including food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
CPI will lead the project's process scale-up activities, drawing on its expertise in bioprocess development and industrial manufacturing. The organisation will develop processes from 50-litre pilot systems through to 10,000-litre demonstration scale.
It will also lead techno-economic assessments to evaluate production costs and commercial viability, while contributing to life-cycle assessment, regulatory planning and business model development.
Kris Wadrop, managing director – materials at CPI, said, “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."
He continued: “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 course of the project, the consortium will demonstrate the industrial-scale cultivation of cocoa cells, develop cocoa-derived ingredient formulations and prototype products.
The project will also release open-source AI tools, datasets and methodologies designed to support wider adoption of plant cell culture technologies across research and industry.
If successful, COCO-AI could support the development of more resilient supplies of high-value natural ingredients while strengthening Europe’s biomanufacturing capabilities and reducing dependence on climate-sensitive agricultural production.