AI-Optimised Plant Cell Culture Platform for Sustainable Production of Secondary Metabolites, Demonstrated with Cocoa

Europe’s bioeconomy is constrained by the limited and unsustainable supply of terrestrial natural products, creating dependency on fragile imports and placing pressure on global ecosystems. Plant cell culture offers a land-independent alternative for producing natural products, but its broader use is limited by slow development cycles, lack of standardised workflows, and high costs. COCO-AI addresses these challenges by establishing an AI-optimised plant cell culture platform as a sustainable, circular, and digitally enabled pathway for high-value secondary metabolites. The project’s innovation is the integration of an AI agent across the full bioproduction workflow, integrated with multi-omics, imaging and process data to predict optimised media and culture conditions, thereby accelerating development and reducing costs. Using cocoa as a socially and economically critical demonstrator, COCO-AI will scale production from lab up to 10,000L bioreactors, delivering six novel secondary metabolite formulations and two prototype chocolate bars. The project will also generate open-source AI tools, validated SOPs, and publicly accessible datasets, lowering entry barriers for SMEs and enabling uptake by diverse bio-based sectors. Complementary life-cycle, techno-economic, and Do-No-Significant-Harm assessments will establish environmental and economic benchmarks at TRL7, while regulatory and consumer studies will guide safe and sustainable market introduction. COCO-AI will create a transferable model for the sustainable production of natural products across multiple plant species. The outcomes will strengthen European strategic autonomy, support the EU Bioeconomy Strategy and Green Deal objectives, and demonstrate scalable solutions for competitive and sustainable bio-based industries.