Chocolate production suffered a vast impact with the emergence of the "witches' broom" disease in cocoa plants. To recover cocoa production, many disease-resistant hybrid plants have been developed. However, some different cocoa hybrids produce cocoa beans that generate chocolate with variable quality. Fermentation of cocoa beans is a microbiological process that can be applied for the producti...

Aikpokpodion PE, Dongo LN (2010) Effects of fermentation intensity on polyphenols and antioxidant capacity of cocoa beans. Int. J. Sustain. Crop Prod. 5(4), 66-70. Cocoa beans were fermented for 1 day, 2 days, 3 days up to 6 days. Result showed that, polyphenols content of the fermented beans dropped from 16.11% on day 0 to 6.01% on day 6. The antioxidant capacity also dropped from 96% (IP) on ...

Raw cocoa has an astringent, unpleasant taste and flavour, and has to be fermented, dried and roasted in order to obtain the characteristic cocoa flavour and taste. During the fermentation microbial activity outside the cocoa beans induces biochemical and physical changes inside the beans. The process is complex involving activity of several different groups of microorganisms which bring about ...

BACKGROUND: Spontaneous cocoa bean fermentation is characterised by a succession of microbial activities. Cocoa flavour precursors are developed during fermentation and drying of cocoa beans. Polyphenols and alkaloids contribute to astringency and bitterness of cocoa and chocolate. RESULTS: Population dynamics, metabolite target analyses, and chocolate production were performed for seven indepe...

The data provide information in support of the research article, "The cleavage specificity of the aspartic protease of cocoa beans involved in the generation of the cocoa-specific aroma precursors" (Janek et al., 2016) [1]. Three different protein substrates were partially digested with the aspartic protease isolated from cocoa beans and commercial pepsin, respectively. The obtained peptide fra...

Good quality cocoa beans are well studied and known as rich source of natural polyphenols. On the contrary, little research has been done regarding polyphenol extracts (PE) from low quality cocoa beans i.e. partially fermented dry cocoa beans (PFDCB) and unfermented dry cocoa beans (UFDCB). The following research was carried out to study the antioxidant, antibacterial, and food colouring proper...

Lung cancer is a common malignancy in men and the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality in men in the western world. Phenolic cocoa ingredients have a strong antioxidative activity and the potential to have a protective effect against cancer. In the present study, we have evaluated the influence of cocoa beans subjected to different processing conditions on cell viability and apoptos...

Cocoa beans are rich in a number of beneficial bioactive compounds that are good for health. However, they have not been exploited to their fullest to produce high quality extract containing stable bioactive compound. The main objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness of the different solvent used for extraction on yield of cocoa butter extracts, oxidative value, phytosterols c...

Studies were conducted to evaluate effects of pod storage (as a means of pulp pre-conditioning) and fermentation time on the fermentative quality and appearance of Ghanaian cocoa beans. The fermentative quality (cut test and fermentation index [FI]) and colour (L, a, b) of the cocoa beans were studied using standard methods. Increasing pod storage and fermentation time significantly (P<0.05) in...

Sixty four samples of cocoa beans replicated in quadruplicates were collected from five warehouses from southwest Nigeria and examined for fungal loads, ergosterol and ochratoxin A The levels of all the variables obtained were further used as indices for cocoa grading into food quality, FoQ (erg < 5 mg/kg; OTA < 1 µg/kg), feed quality, FeQ (erg = 5~10 mg/kg; OTA in the range of 1.1~3.11 µg/kg),...