hideous chemistry combination, that’s not the goal. The goal is to try to identify what makes organic work, and bring that to the forefront.”
McShea is wary of revealing too much about the lab techniques they’ll be using to examine the elusive bean. The research is in early stages, and he’s worried about competition. But the technologies all rely on the fact that the cocoa bean goes through big changes from its growth to final form in a bar, confection, or hot drink.
The cocoa bean begins life as a seed, nestled in white pulp inside football-sized cocoa fruits. Farmers ferment the pulp and beans in giant, bacteria-filled piles before shipping the beans to factories like Theo’s. Once factories receive fermented and dried beans, they are roasted, ground, cured, and further refined into what we think of as chocolate. All of these steps produce signatures of changing chemical compounds, McShea said, and the chocolate scientist knows which signatures he’s looking for. By reading these chemical fingerprints using “electronic noses”—lab equipment that separates and pinpoints a wide range of molecules—the chocolate makers can identify the best beans at each step.
These technologies have already changed the way Theo is doing some of its business, McShea said. By looking at the compounds in its shipped beans, the Theo team realized that the beans were not being kept at the optimal humidity and temperature during shipment.
The company is especially interested in putting these techniques to use on site in Africa and South America, McShea said. While helping farmers convert from conventional methods to organic, they can use the electronic nose to check the fermentation of the beans. The fingerprint in organically fermented beans is pretty different from those treated with pesticides and other chemicals, McShea said.
Theo is not the only company using laboratory techniques to test cocoa beans, but McShea thinks Theo has an edge as a small organic company trying to use innovative means to improve the quality of its product. The big chocolate companies using this kind of science have different goals, he said. “They want a low price, and they don’t want rocks in their cocoa, and that’s about it,” McShea said.
“We want to make something superb, and that’s really hard!” he said, chuckling. “But chocolate’s fun. It really is a fun business.”