Or, a yummy way to help the West African cocoa farmer is to purchase chocolate from my company, Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates. Or, visit Splash Cafe, my sister's restaurant. Splash Cafe and its sister business, Splash Cafe Artisan Bakery donate at least $2500 every summer to Project Hope and Fairness and makes my trips possible.
Beans are analyzed by the buyers. Pisteurs pick the beans up and give the farmers a price that is often purposely inferior to the recommended price. Traittants store beans in their country warehouses. Buyers analyze the beans in their laboratories and pay the traittants accordingly. The first step in analysis is to count the beans per 100g. Optimum is 100 = 100 g or 1 g per dried bean. Then the laboratory personnel cut the beans and arrange them in a 10X10 matrix. This gives an immediate percentage of beans with the following flaws:
Mites (bugs)
Purple (underfermented)
Slaty (underfermented)
Moldy (kept moist too long)
More than 100 beans per 100 g reflects off-season (lower rainfall), young trees, or pods picked too early. Fewer than 100 reflects older trees or pods too mature when harvested.
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Determining "count" or "grainage". Number of beans per 100g. Coopaga, near San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2006.
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Doing the cut test. Coopaga Fair Trade Cooperative, near San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2006.
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Page from analysis results. Traits listed: TH (Taux Humidite) or moisture level. G (grainage); 106 is high and indicates some immature beans or ones that are too small. Moisies (Moldy); 19% is shockingly high. Ardoises (Slaty); indicates under fermented. Plates (flat) indicates underdeveloped beans that not have been allowed to mature. Mitees (buggy); 1% is low. Germinees (germinated); percentage that have picked too ripe. Violets (purple); indicates underfermentation.
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Sampling ("Sondage") at a cocoa warehouse in San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire. 2007. Bags are sampled in five places and dropped in a bucket that is labeled and sent to the laboratory.
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Bags are separated by moisture content so 9% moisture beans are not dried with the 12% moisture beans. San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007.
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In the QC lab, beans from the blue bucket are analyzed, then poured back into a bag and stored with the spec sheet that is provided to the bean buyer.
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Doing the cut test. Beans are cut using a razor blade and laid out in ten rows of ten. Moldy, buggy, slatey, etc., beans are counted and the number represents the percentage of each trait. San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007
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The trouble with Ivorian cocoa: too much mold. This comes because the government has done a lousy job of extension, taxing the farmers to pay for it and then doing nothing to improve cocoa quality. Ivorian villages each need a cocoa dryer to get dryness down to 7% before the mold penetrates the shell. Saf Cacao Testing Laboratory, San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007.
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More mold. Note the bean at the lower left. It still has some of the flesh attached: a sign of inadequate fermentation followed by insufficient culling of the low quality beans. Saf Cacao Testing Laboratory, San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007.
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A properly fermented cocoa bean. Note the autolysis of the bean's interior, absence of insects and absence of mold. Saf Cacao Testing Laboratory, San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007.
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Cutting cocoa beans in half prior to grading. Saf Cacao Testing Laboratory, San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007.
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Board used for grading beans. Saf Cacao Testing Laboratory, San Pedro, Cote d'Ivoire, 2007.
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