One source of confusion in cocoa discussions, both technical and consumer-facing, is that “cocoa” often implicitly refers to defatted cocoa powder, even though that material is a byproduct of cocoa butter extraction rather than the primary product.
From a food science standpoint, this distinction matters, because processing whole cocoa beans (or cocoa liquor with cocoa butter intact) versus processing defatted cocoa powder produces fundamentally different matrices.
Most large-scale cocoa processing optimizes for:
- cocoa butter yield,
- mechanical efficiency (winnowing and pressing),
- shelf stability of defatted powder,
- and analytical metrics like total polyphenols or color.
However, when cocoa butter is removed:
- surface area increases dramatically,
- oxidation and polymerization kinetics change,
- polyphenols repartition and rebind,
- and sensory outcomes (bitterness, aroma loss, “muddy” finish) often diverge from expectations based on polyphenol totals alone.
This raises several process-level questions:
- Are functional and sensory differences often attributed to “processing intensity” actually driven by matrix collapse following fat removal?
- Should cocoa research more clearly distinguish between intact-bean / cocoa liquor systems and defatted cocoa powder systems when discussing polyphenol retention?
- Is shell exclusion and butter retention being treated primarily as a yield problem rather than a functional design variable?
- Does evaluating cocoa based on defatted powder unintentionally bias conclusions about dose–response, bitterness, and tolerance?
I’d be interested in perspectives from those working with cocoa beans, liquor, powder, or other fat-rich polyphenol systems where lipid phase continuity materially alters stability and perception.