Sandy Ong
speaker
279 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Sandy Ong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
super excited about this week's theme because I don't know about you guys, but I loved Rodell growing up.
One of my favorite books of his was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which as you probably know is about young Charlie Bucket winning a golden ticket to visit the world famous but very mysterious Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
Which is this glorious place of a chocolate river, edible rooms, and so on.
But what I want to talk about today is a different kind of magic.
Scientists who are trying to create chocolate
a very
Good morning.
So cacao, which is the plant that gives us cocoa, it's been having a rough few years.
And this is something that we've discussed on previous episodes, right?
So basically there's been this perfect storm of disease, climate change, deforestation, and poor farming practices in Ghana and Ivory Coasts, where about 70% of the world's cocoa is grown.
And that's caused a severe shortage of cocoa in recent years, which is why in the past few years researchers have been working to find alternative ways to produce cacao.
Okay, like growing chocolate in the lab.
Tell us more.
So there's a bunch of different companies that are looking into this.
Most of them are in the US or Europe, and there's one in Israel as well.
They have different proprietary methods, but broadly speaking, they all use the same approach.
So first of all, they choose a cacao bean from a tree that has especially good flavour, aroma, or some other desirable property.
They then take some cells from this bean and they put it in a nutritious liquid, which makes the cells grow and multiply.
And all this takes place in large bioreactors.
So it's similar to the tanks that are used for brewing beer.
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