Maintaining Excellence: Strategies for Year-to-Year Standardization in Cocoa Flavor Quality Challenges

For chocolate-based products, flavor is one of the most important characteristics associated with product quality, along with brand and price].and as "comfort food" i.e. a food that offers psychological and emotional comfort [1-3]. The flavor quality is often influenced by marketing and the supply chain. However, standardizing this quality over time is difficult due to the different origins of cocoa and many independent farmers, resulting in significant fragmentation and heterogeneity of lots. Objective tools are essential for monitoring sustainable cocoa production, especially considering climate change and the political situation in cocoa-producing countries. Assessing flavor quality requires analytical equipment that produces detailed profiles correlated with sensory characteristics, enabling objective evaluation in quality control (QC) [4]. In this study, non-targeted fingerprinting and profiling approaches (HS-SPME-GC-MS) were applied in combination with machine learning tools for flavor identitation of the origin, to find origin flavor similarity with the industry quality standard and model new blends for comparison with the standard reference flavor. [5-6]. The results indicate clear clustering according to their origin, although with differences at the molecular level. The NEAR index, calculated using the OAV of selected origin markers, showed Ecuador to be the most similar to the reference in terms of flavor. Through PLS-DA modeling of the chemical-specific origin profile and sensory similarity, blends with various proportions of Ecuadorian cocoa were created.