Both consumers and manufacturers have recently become more concerned with food product provenance for a variety of reasons, including production ethics and product quality. An example of such a food product is chocolate, which is a mixture of cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, sugar, and sometimes milk. Cocoa liquor is derived from cocoa beans which have been roasted and ground to a liquid. The flavor and quality of chocolate is heavily influenced by the quality of cocoa liquor used in its production. Cocoa bean traceability has a growing importance in the cocoa value chain, not only due to quality factors but also due to increased demand for verification of ethical production practices. This project focused on single-origin cocoa liquor samples to determine if elemental signatures in the liquor could be correlated to the country of origin. Elemental analysis was performed using ICP-MS and the resulting data analyzed by chemometric approaches. Two main questions were investigated: 1) Could cocoa liquor samples from four or more countries be discriminated from each other? And 2) Would liquor samples from the same location but undergoing different processing treatments have the same elemental signature?<br/>Initial results indicate that single-origin cocoa liquors from five countries can be discriminated from each other based on their elemental signatures (Figure 1). In addition, the cocoa liquor samples that were produced from different treatment processes (e.g. roast temperature and time), while having some differences in their signatures, were still correctly classified by country of origin. Future work will examine additional single-origin cocoa liquors and will aim to determine which elements are most significant in defining a signature that will allow the determination of provenance.

Using trace element signatures to determine cocoa liquor provenance

249th National Meeting (2015)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.