That's because palm oil is relatively inexpensive and"so damn good at what it does," Ticku said."Palm oil is used in most candies that have a chocolate coating, and it is truly the thing that is responsible for making chocolate melt in your mouth and not in your hand, because it's got a melting profile that melts at body temp and not at room temperature.
To make its palm oil alternative, C16 Biosciences uses a wild type yeast microbe that makes a functional equivalent to palm oil with a kind of fermentation process. And fermentation — which is what has been used to make wine, beer and cheese for ages — is a"really, really robust, scalable process," Heller said."We can design an experiment and start it and get a learning about whether that helped us produce better and more oil within about seven days," Heller said.