54. Three Determinants to Cocoa Quality

May 3, 2024

Cocoa is trading at $9,000 per MT.  The price outlook remains bullish (positive price pressure).  For farmers to make the best profits, they need to produce the highest quality beans possible.  If cocoa is fermented properly, the beans develop the maximal.  There are three determinants.

First Determinant of Quality:  proper harvesting.  If the pod is too ripe, it lacks the sugars to drive a proper fermentation.

Second Determinant of Quality:  dry the beans properly.  For best results, dry under the sun.  Artificial heating tends to lock acetic acid inside the beans. 

Third Determinant of Quality:  triage.  This means removing material that will add bad flavors.  Small and insect-riddled beans burn easily, for example.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 2:06

That was Chopin's prelude in B minor, number six. That was played at Chopin's funeral, and as you can tell, it's not one of his cheerier pieces of music. Chopin, really, of all the composers, was the best at expressing emotions. So welcome to podcast number 54, three steps toward cocoa quality. In the last podcast, I talked about how we are trying to make the cocoa farmer a chocolate producer and not merely a commodity provider. I summarized the history of how the cocoa tree became important in West African life, including the use of child labor. I talked about how Project Open Fairness has involved the cocoa farmer in production by selling his or her products locally within Africa and overseas. Finally, I talked about Projet Espoir et Equité, the French nonprofit that I founded three years ago, and its associated store here in Corsier-Ciel called Le Comtoir du Cacao, the cocoa counter. It is making chocolates and pastries using chocolate manufactured in two of the three villages that we have established as little factories. Today I want to start with market uncertainty. As I'm sure you all know, this is a burning topic. Here's an extract from Trading Economics, TradingEconomics.com, for the last two weeks of April. Cocoa futures traded around $9,200 per ton, marking the lowest level in over a month amidst ongoing volatility caused by severe liquidity constraints. The market has been volatile with prices falling one day and surging the next. Futures have dropped more than 20% in the last two sessions of April from a record high of $12,218 per metric ton reached on April 19th, as the earlier rally has made it more expensive to maintain positions, prompting investors to close out trades and curbing liquidity. Nonetheless, the outlook remains bullish due to the persistent uncertainty regarding global supplies. Adverse weather conditions, aging cocoa trees, and crop diseases continue to affect West Africa, which accounts for more than half of global output. Acute shortages have already prompted top growers, Ivory Coast and Ghana, to delay deliveries. Interestingly, the authors make no mention of global warming or deforestation. They refer to adverse weather conditions, which is a euphemism for global warming, the root cause of most adverse weather conditions these days. They also completely ignore deforestation. The fact is that cutting down 90% of the remaining rainforests in the past 20 years in Ghana and Ivory Coast in order to plant cocoa trees is at the heart of diminishing rainfall. Cocoa trees need rain as their natural environment is the rainforest. Instead, commodity traders blame old trees and diseases, which have plagued the cocoa industry for hundreds of years, just as old age and disease have plagued humans for millions of years. Whatever the cause of all this uncertainty, everyone in the cocoa industry is preparing for tough times ahead. The big companies are signing contracts with cooperatives, and they are investing in these cooperatives in order to guarantee future yields and better prices. This is good for the big guys and for the farmers, but this will not be as powerful as actually empowering the cocoa farmer to control the value chain. As Benjamin Franklin, a hallowed founder of American Economics, observed, God helps those who help themselves. In other words, find the root causes and then do something. In the past, Project Hope and Fairness has focused on helping develop markets for cocoa farmer produced chocolate. And that has worked. For example, Soko Plan, our first cooperative, was started by David Logovo Zigro, with whom I have worked since 2012. Project Hope and Fairness supplied most of the machinery and operating funds from the very beginning until now. But thanks to David's own initiative and the Ivorian government's confidence in him, David has just had six successful days at SIAM SIAM, which stands for Salon International de l'Agriculture au Maroc, that is International Salon of Agriculture in Morocco. Ten days ago, the Ivorian government sent David to Mecnus, Morocco, which is and the event is attended by 900,000 participants. He spent the week talking to people in the cocoa business, especially representatives of French company, who were particularly impressed by the quality of his chocolate. David's chocolate is also praised by the customers of my shop, the Contoir du Cacao. Yesterday, a German from Düsseldorf was here with his wife and a friend. He bought seven nougatines, two for them to enjoy on the spot, and two to give to friends, and three more for dessert after dinner that evening. Nougatines as I make them are hard caramel triangles packed with toasted cocoa nibs and dipped in David's fantastic chocolate. This is where we are headed. If cocoa farmers and their families are going to thrive, it's not going to be by producing bulk chocolate for supermarkets. The fact is, the world has changed. Because of deforestation, because of fossil fuel burning, because of old trees and diseases, it is no longer enough to sell low-quality beans and dose them with vanilla to hide their defects. If the cocoa farmer is to thrive, he or she must be able to produce flavor beans in addition to bulk beans. But the flavor beans are where the real money lies because the farmer gets paid a premium for quality. Right now we are in the process of setting up the Indus facility as for teaching. You may recall that we installed chocolate making machines at Nduce a little over a year ago in June of 2023. Since then, they have been making chocolate bars and selling them. But we soon learned that while we had the machinery, we didn't have the beans. In DAPA, where David makes his incomparable chocolate, employees of SOCO Plan know how to recognize quality beans. No such expertise exists in NDUC. After all, it took 11 years from 2013 to 2024 for SOCO Plan to reach its current state. So we're going to help NDUC get there. And in this year, 2024, we are going to change that. We are going to develop the expertise at NDUC and teach cocoa farmers in surrounding communities so they too can become known for the quality of their beans. Flavor beans don't just happen. First, they require proper harvesting. You have to harvest ripe pods, not unripe pods, and not over-ripe pods. A cocoa pod which looks a bit like a toy football is filled with 30 to 40 beans, each surrounded by a mucilaginous white material whose flavor is bewitchingly sweet and sour, with notes of apricot, pineapple, and guava. The sugar content of the ripe fruity exterior of each bean is about 20%. When fermented, these sugars turn to alcohol and then to acetic acid. And the acetic acid then turns into an array of organic compounds that are referred to as precursors of chocolate flavor in the industry. Overripe beans are bad business. The sugar levels drop during the ripening process as they over-ripen and consequently fermentation suffers. Often proteins of overripe beans disintegrate into smelly byproducts that contribute an earthy or dirty flavor. When cocoa pods are harvested, they are cut from the tree trunks and gathered into piles. The pods, which have inch-thick shells, are either cut open with a machete or hit firmly with a stick to crack them open. One scoops the seedy interior into a receptacle and at the same time one separates the seeds from the placental tissue and throws the placental tissue away. For maximum quality, it is not only important that the seeds be fully ripe, but they also should not age before they ferment. The rule of thumb is no more than six hours can elapse before fermentation is started. Once the seeds are extracted, their sugar levels drop and the quality of fermentation will suffer. Proper fermentation is the second determinant of quality flavor beans. The purpose of fermentation is to cause the pulp on the outside of each bean to disappear. Basically, it liquefies. First, the pulp's texture is a function of pectins and complex carbohydrates, both of which degrade enzymatically. At the same time, simple carbs, namely sugars, dissolved in the pulp, turn into ethanol or alcohol. To make this all happen, the beans need to be fermented in sizable quantities, at a minimum 100 kilos or 220 pounds. The alcoholic stage of fermentation lasts about 48 hours. One measures the temperature of the fermenting beans every three hours and then graphs it. During the alcoholic stage, the temperature rise is incremental. But toward the end of the alcoholic phase, the slope of the temperature curve increases, caused by the oxidation of ethanol into acetic acid. This is caused by acetobacter, a bacterium found in most fruit. At this point, it is important to stir the beans in order to provide the oxygen necessary for conversion by bacteria to acetic acid. Not stirring the beans will result in off flavors. Traditionally, West African fermentation happens in piles. First, you find you find a dip in the ground and you line it with banana leaves, and then you pile the beans on them and cover them with the leaves. It is much harder to control the fermentation this way, however. Now cooperatives in West Africa are increasingly adopting the box method. It is much easier to control the conditions so that one gets good tasting beans. In the box method, three rows of boxes are stacked and cantilevered in such a way that you carry the beans to the top box, fill it to the top with raw beans, and cover them with banana leaves. The banana leaves keep the environment hypoxic, that is anaerobic, in order to drive the fermentation toward alcohol production, while maintaining an internal temperature that favors the growth of yeasts. When the temperature of the beans begins to really rise, that is the slope of the temperature curve bends sharply upward, one then opens the top box and shovels the beans to the middle box, the one just below it. As the beans fall into the middle box, they entrain oxygen with them, and acetobacter really begins to grow on the alcohols, converting them into vinegar or acetic acid. At this point, the temperature of the beans rises sharply and reaches a maximum around 50 degrees centigrade or 122 degrees Fahrenheit. When the temperature begins to fall from this maximum, about two days later, it is time to transfer the fermenting beans to the third box. Again, this entrains oxygen and restarts the vinegar fermentation. After a total of six days, the beans have lost all their pulp and have turned into a light tan color. At this point, they are transferred to a drying area. If cocoa beans are fermented properly, they have developed the right precursors for a good chocolate flavor. That is, the roasted cocoa beans will develop a chocolatey flavor caused by the reaction between proteins and sugars, the so-called Maillard reaction. And they will also have aldehydes and ketones, derivatives of acetic acid, that add a fruitiness to the chocolate. The third determinant of quality is the drying of the beans. This can be done in one of two ways, either by exposure to the sun or to air heated by burning wood or fossil fuels. About 90% of the world's cocoa beans are dried using solar energy. This takes between 5 and 15 days depending upon solar intensity. As you might expect, drying with heated air is much quicker, but it produces a lower quality product. Solar drying is much superior. If the outside of the beans exceeds 50 degrees centigrade, then the acetic acid becomes locked inside the bean. And that's what happens with the artificial drying. With solar drying, the outside of the beans never gets as high as 50 degrees, so the acetic acid is uh per free to leave the bean. But with artificial heating, uh the outside uh gets toughens and forms a shell, and that prevents the acetic acid from leaving, which produces chocolates that have a harsher flavor, and you have to conch the chocolate or stir it for uh days in order to drive off the acetic acid that you could have not had if you just bought solar dried beans. Beans are dried until they reach 7% humidity, which is measured with an electronic humidity meter. Okay, now we come to the third determinator of bean quality, the step known as triage, which means sorting. Once beans are dried, they are either stored or shipped. If shipped, they are sold to a chocolate maker who then determines their quality by these gauges percentage of humidity, percentage of slatey beans, percentage of violet beans, flat beans, moldy beans, insect attack beans, and germinated beans. Triage is basically an elimination stage to avoid eat at the beginning to avoid purchasing a bad batch of beans or to eliminate individual beans after purchase so that you have a quality chocolate. One avoids making a purchase should the percentages of defective beans be above one's standard. This is determined by using the cut test. The cut test involves a little machine, uh hand operated machine that allows you to put 100 beans in a plate, on a plate with indentations, and then you slide a razor-sharp knife across the 100 beans, cutting them all in half. Then at this point, you count the numbers of each defect and record them as percentages. So you count the number of violet, the number of slatey, the number of insect attacks, etc. And the number is the percentage because you started out with 100 beans. So we sort out defective beans uh in order to improve the overall quality of our chocolate. Uh and you can do this without the guillotine for certain defects. For example, all flat beans come from unripe pods, and such beans burn when roasted. So when you're sorting, after you've purchased your batch of beans, you go through and you pull out all the flat beans and throw them away. By eliminating them, we avoid adding a smoky taste to our chocolate. Similarly, if we find pieces of bean, broken bean, they also burn easily. So we have to throw those out because they also add a smoky flavor. In addition, it's important to remove sticks, stones, and other non-food contaminants. Next, we measure the humidity of the batch that we have of beans that we have bought. Beans' moisture content should measure 7% relative humidity. Should the percentage rise or be higher than that, the cocoa butter, which is about 50% of the beans dry weight, will degrade enzymatically, producing a chocolate that doesn't temper well and stays soft. This is because the chalk the the um cocoa butter, the fat, has been uh altered enzymatically. Um so this is why storage conditions are so important. If beans are higher than 8%, then you have problems and you need to spread them out on a tarp and or bake them in an oven to drive the humidity level back down to 7% when the bean is remains stable. As mentioned previously, quality is measured by percentage of beans belonging to certain categories. First, you count the slaty and so say you've done a cut test. First, you count the slaty and violet beans. Slaty beans uh look like a smooth slate writing board. Such beans have undergone no fermentation at all and are high in astringency and bitterness. And you're going to have to add a lot of sugar or milk powder or add a lot of vinyl to hide that. Uh, violet beans are a little less smooth and have a few fissures, a sign of moderate fermentation. The violet color comes from the anthocyanin pigments, which are purple, and if they're not fermented properly, the violet stays. And so such beans are less astringent and bitter than the slatey beans, but they still have astringency and bitterness, and that has to be uh removed either with sugar, uh milk powder, or um or by dilution, by diluting, by adding mixing defective beans with good beans. Moldy beans add an earthy or mushroomy flavor to chocolate. Insect-attacked beans tend to burn as they often are riddled with holes. Germinated beans add an unpleasant, funky uh flavor because the proteins have been degraded and releasing ammonia and sulfur-containing compounds. Surprisingly, well-fermented beans are look the ugliest. So when you do the cut test and you see the ugliest beans are the ones that are well fermented, their interiors are riven with fissures that make the beans liable to disintegrate into bits or nibs when the beans are dried to 7%. But the well-fermented beans have the lowest bitterness, highest concentration of flavors, and produce the best chocolate. Well, that gives a little primer on flavor and three ways that you can alter and improve the flavor of chocolate. So we are at the end of the podcast. I hope that you have gained an appreciation of how important the post harvest treatment of the cocoa bean is to the flavor of chocolate. I'm really excited at the prospect of teaching cocoa farmers at NDUCI how to earn a much better price for their beans, even if their yields drop because of global warming. And deforestation and other causes. They can cope if they maximize the quality in face of diminishing quantity. And now for uh prelude number 24 from Johann Sebastian Bach.