The company has reportedly entered a licensing agreement with Pairwise, an agricultural gene editing firm to speed up the development of hardier cocoa crops.
Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s and Skittles, is reportedly looking to gene-editing technology to secure the supply of cocoa plants.
The company has entered a licensing agreement with Pairwise, an agricultural gene editing firm, according to a report by Bloomberg, to speed up the development of hardier cocoa crops.
The agreement would give Mars access to Pairwise’s CRISPR tools, which would allow scientists to modify the DNA sequences of cocoa plants, the report said. This includes enzymes and trait libraries.
“The ultimate goal is to help address the pressures cacao faces globally from climate variability, plant diseases and environmental stresses,” Pairwise told Bloomberg. Gene editing “has the potential to improve crops in ways that support and strengthen global supply chains,” according to Mars’s plant sciences director, Carl Jones.
The race to secure cocoa production has ensued for candymakers like Mars, Hershey’s (HSY) and Mondelez (MDLZ) after it was reported that the cocoa yield from the Ivory Coast and Ghana – two of the world’s largest producers of cocoa reponsible for 60% of the crop’s global supply – has been falling over the past few years due to the impact of climate change.
Farmers increasingly relying on fertilizers and pesticides has also impacted productivity, along with the onset of the Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus (CSSV), which has spread to nearly all cocoa-producing regions.
The traditional breeding process method to produce more resilient cocoa plants can take decades and would involve the mixing of tens of thousands of genes. According to Pairwise Chief Executive Officer Tom Adams, this results in “really low chances of getting exactly what you want.”
In contrast, CRISPR lets researchers narrow down the process to include only specifically desired traits. Researchers would still get the same result as from breeding, “but you’re stacking the odds to get what you want,” he said.
This is not Mars’ first foray towards securing its cocoa supply with the help of gene-editing. In 2018, the company announced a decade-long $1 billion investment to support the cocoa supply chain, which included support for researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, to use CRISPR to develop disease-resistant cocoa trees.
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