The production of cocoa involves numerous steps that include growing, harvesting, fermentation, drying, roasting, and numerous additional final preparations. Many of these steps are performed under varying conditions, such as soil composition, fermentation time, and roasting temperature. All of these factors can change the medley of compounds that make up a cocoa sample. Many studies employing instrumental techniques including GC/ MS, GC/ FID, ICP-MS, and HPLC have analyzed cocoa to quantify or detect the presence of compounds within a given cocoa sample. However, there is a lack of a coherent analytical method to quantify numerous qualities of a cocoa sample, and this can lead to difficulty in proving the veracity of a given sample’s label. Previous work showed that the country of origin of a cocoa sample can be accurately determined by using the ICP-MS to construct an elemental profile unique to each country and then identifying unknowns from that profile. The LC/MS the potential to identify different genetic strains as well as classify different chemical compounds that contribute to taste and other desired qualities.<br/>The work presented describes cocoa sample preparation and UPLC/ESI-TOFMS conditions to obtain unique chemical signatures for cocoa liquor samples. These chemical signatures have been used to identify the country of origin for several countries (Figure 1).

UPLC/ESI-TOFMS method development for cocoa origin classification

255th National Meeting (2018)

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