FT-NIR analaysis for chocolate & cocoa sector - Food and Beverage

The cocoa bean is the seed of the tropical cacao tree and is used to make cocoa powder, chocolate from cocoa liquor, and cocoa butter. Worldwide production has grown by nearly 200% in the last forty years. Bean pods are harvested, laid out to ferment, dried, and shipped to a manufacturing plant. Manufacturing steps include cleaning, alkalization (Dutching), milling, mixing, conching, and tempering. Both the raw materials and manufacturing steps are monitored for quality control. Traditional methods such as HPLC, GC, and wet chemistry for determining chocolate quality are labor intensive, time-consuming, can only measure one parameter at a time, and require the use of expensive solvents and reagents, especially during the manufacturing process. FT-NIR spectroscopic analysis is fast, requires no sample preparation, and can analyze multiple parameters with a single measurement.