Ghanaian cocoa bean fermentation characterized by spectroscopic and chromatographic methods and chemometrics.

Export of cocoa beans is of great economic importance in Ghana and several other tropical countries. Raw cocoa has an astringent, unpleasant taste, and flavor, and has to be fermented, dried, and roasted to obtain the characteristic cocoa flavor and taste. In an attempt to obtain a deeper understanding of the changes in the cocoa beans during fermentation and investigate the possibility of future development of objective methods for assessing the degree of fermentation, a novel combination of methods including cut test, colorimetry, fluorescence spectroscopy, NIR spectroscopy, and GC-MS evaluated by chemometric methods was used to examine cocoa beans sampled at different durations of fermentation and samples representing fully fermented and dried beans from all cocoa growing regions of Ghana.