Xjyuk

I am inspired by some people who apparently believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

I know that for sweet, delicious chocolate to come into existence, we need to do things to cocoa. Ferment it, grind it, mix it, bake it. That's boring. Besides, as cheap as human labour comes, animal don't unionise.

Would it be possible for us to engineer a creature (preferably an animal) that produces chocolate from its teats (or other parts)?

Conditions:

1. I am willing to accept all kinds of animals, i.e.: if aphids are a better choice for the task, so be it.


2. Due to the above, the final product doesn't have to be milk chocolate. The goal is met when we have the raw, bitter stuff.


3. If chocolate is not possible, then cocoa butter, cocoa solids or a mix of both are acceptable.

Ok, so this seems pretty simple. There are three basic things that happen to turn cocoa beans into something reasonably approximating chocolate.

1: Fermentation

Counterintuitively, the first step in turning Cocoa beans into chocolate is getting RID of the sugars that are already there, allowing the natural yeasts and micro-organisms to turn the sugars in a ripe bean into alcohol, and then acetic acid. This is critical in generating the aromas and flavors that we associate with chocolate.

Fermentation is also a pretty common process in digestion though, so it's totally plausible that an organism could eat the beans and, in the process of digesting them, complete the fermentation.

2: Roasting

The roasting does a few things. It removes the husks from the actual choco-meat, it sterilizes the choco-meat, and it does some more chemstry to improve the flavor. In the case of an animal, the first of those items can be handled by chewing, the second is... probably just not going to happen, and the third can be managed by the appropriate acidic environment in the digestive system.

3: Addition of sugar
The easiest way to manage this is for our animal to supplement its diet of cocoa beans with other stuff that has lots of sugar. Fruits, for example, sugar cane depending on location, stuff like that.

All of that having been said, there's a clear answer right here.

BEES!

Big, freaking, cretaceous sized monster bees. They do the honey thing, but ALSO like to have a gnosh on cocoa beans. The two things get mixed together and then vomited up into giant beehives just like modern bees do honey, only more choco-tastic.

Considering all the ingredients are biological products there is no reason you can't. Although it might be easier to just engineer the cacao plant considering all the ingredients are already present. Dark chocolate fruit sounds amazing. You need to engineer them to produce it in the fruit flesh instead of just the seeds, producing fewer alkaloids will help as well that is where the bitterness comes from.

You might want to have a look at this patent about artificial chocolate flavor

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2835590A/en

If it is possible to produce the flavor in the laboratory it should be possible to maybe create certain bacteria to do the job for you. You might however need more than one kind and they would still need to grow in big and controlled storages. I’m not a bio engineer but maybe someone else can give a more profound answer to my claim.

Once you have the flavor you probably can produce something similar in taste to natural chocolate.

Chocolate contains theobromine, an alchaloid like caffeine, cocaine etc. All these alchaloid toxins are used by the plants as defense against attackers (though we humans get usually oddly addicted to those which do not kills us immediately).

Which animals already produce toxins? Some tetraodontiformes fishes, several spiders, several snakes, several insects.

You would need to add more to just theobromine, but you have already the reactor.

Insects, spiders and snakes would have little individual production, but the first two can compensate with large numbers per unit surface. Plus spiders could produce chocolate in convenient filaments, instead of their silk.

The tetraodontiformes fishes could have their whole body made of chocolate, similarly to how its bowels and skin are already packed with tetrodotoxin.

Since it is already the case that goats have been modified to produce spider silk in their milk, it would not be a big stretch to have them make the chemical components of chocolate.

However, since there are between 300 and 500 different chemicals in chocolate it might be a lot easier just to get chocolate from the plants we already do. Probably to get non-lethal and pleasant tasting chocolate would take a lot of "nudging, poking, probing, twiddling, fiddling, and messing around."