Hi,

I've bought something called
Cocoa Fantastico!
"Chocolate Creme Flavor"
"100% Unsweetened Cocoa Powder"

Ingredients:
!00% Unsweetened Cocoa Powder, Cocoa Solids

1 TBS (1/2 oz)
calories 50
total fat 1g
sat fat 0
cholesterol 0
sodium 22mg
total carbohydrate 19g
dietary fiber 3g
sugars 0g
protien 3g

vitamin A 0%
vitamin C 0%
calcium 15%
Iron 440% !

Vs plain old commercial Cocoa powder
the things that stand out are
the Iron content (100x) !
calories (3x)
some sodium also in this stuff, vs 0

As far as taste, I haven't come to a conclusion.
It seems very similar to plain Cocoa powder though.
As far as cost -- about 1/3 generic Cocoa powder!

Any comments on this stuff?

thanks
waterboy

at Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:37:31 GMT in 1132069051.604613.165230
@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com, (WaterBoy) wrote :

Hi,

I've bought something called
Cocoa Fantastico!
"Chocolate Creme Flavor"
"100% Unsweetened Cocoa Powder"

Ingredients:
!00% Unsweetened Cocoa Powder, Cocoa Solids

This is going to take a bit of explanation.

The issue here is that the term "Cocoa solids" in the industry is generally
used with a percentage, to denote the percentage of the total ingredients
in a given product that came from the cocoa bean itself. A cocoa bean is
composed of 2 separable parts - the defatted cocoa and the cocoa butter.
Typically cocoa butter is about 55% of a cocoa bean. So 45% is defatted
cocoa. Normal cocoa powder, meanwhile, comes in 2 basic types, low-fat,
containing about 9% cocoa butter, and high-fat, containing about 21% cocoa
butter. Cocoa powder is usually made by removing cocoa butter from
chocolate liquor, which is simply the end product after the beans have been
roasted and ground - pure chocolate mass with nothing else in it. As you
can see the process isn't perfectly efficient at removing the cocoa butter
- not that you'd necessarily want this: defatted cocoa would be dry and
somewhat tasteless.

Now, cocoa solids might be thought of as chocolate liquor, but it's not
quite that simple. When making a typical chocolate bar, most manufacturers
add some extra cocoa butter to the bar (which they got by making cocoa
powder) and some add cocoa powder as well. The result is a bar with a
variety of cocoa butter percentages ranging from as low as 30% to as high
as 55%. In order to get the cocoa solids percentage, which is is the number
they usually announce boldly on the front, they add up the total amount of
chocolate liquor plus cocoa butter plus cocoa powder they used in making
the bar, and divide that by the total mass of the bar. This is one reason
why the cocoa solids percentage is only a rough indicator of intensity -
for instance, El Rey's Gran Saman, at 70%, is actually more intense than
Apamate, at 73.5%, because the Apamate contains more cocoa butter - 42%
versus 37% - and this reduces the net amount of defatted cocoa (which is
what ultimately delivers the intensity of flavour).

So really cocoa solids can be considered to be anything that came from the
cocoa bean itself.


1 TBS (1/2 oz)
calories 50
total fat 1g
sat fat 0
cholesterol 0
sodium 22mg
total carbohydrate 19g
dietary fiber 3g
sugars 0g
protien 3g

vitamin A 0%
vitamin C 0%
calcium 15%
Iron 440% !

My Ghirardelli high-fat cocoa powder has the following figures:

1 tbsp (6g)
calories 15
total fat 1.5 g
total carb 3g
dietary fiber 2g
protein 1g

calcium 0%
iron 8%

The issue with your label is that it's not believable. Grams are units of
mass, where tablespoons are units of volume. Oz can be either weight or
volume, depending on whether they mean fluid ounces or not.

In any case, there are 28 grams in an ounce, at least in Earth's gravity.
Meanwhile a tablespoon is half a fluid ounce, and one tbsp of water weighs
1/2 oz. Other substances with other densities will have different weights
for the same volume.

Ok, now, adding up the claimed nutritive grams in your product, this would
correspond to 23 grams. If the 1 tbsp measure is correct, and we take 1
tbsp of water = 14 grams, the density of your powder would have to be 1.6
times that of water, roughly that of pure table sugar. We can conclude in
any event that they would be adding some highly refined carbohydrate, just
because of the huge leap in carbs over what you have in a simple tablespoon
of cocoa.

So unless they have some process whereby they're specifically refining the
carbohydrates in cocoa beans, which would then justify their "Cocoa
solids" ingredient - if in a very misleading way - their ingredient label
is probably wrong. Note that they don't list any sugars in the breakdown of
carbs - which unless it's a lie refutes the notion that they're adding a
bunch of sugar (otherwise the most reasonable explanation). I think also as
a result it's likely we can dismiss the iron listing on similar grounds.
Molasses is pretty dense in iron, but if they were adding that, sugars
would still show up and furthermore it still doesn't give the requisite
iron content, not to mention of course that the product would then be a
liquid.

As far as taste, I haven't come to a conclusion.
It seems very similar to plain Cocoa powder though.
As far as cost -- about 1/3 generic Cocoa powder!

....

Which would make sense again if the product were mostly sugar. In fact, all
the evidence save the sugars - 0g listing seems to point to this conclusion
and I'm very, very suspicious that something like this is going on.

--
Alex Rast

(remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)

Alex,

I goofed
I was trying to simplify, and actually did the opposite
Here are the corrected

2 Tbsp serving size (1 0z)

calories 100 calories from fat 10
total fat 1g
sat fat 0
cholesterol 0
sodium 22

total carbhydrate 19g
dietary fiber 3g
sugars 0g
protien 3g

vitamin A daily% 0
vitamin C daily% 0
calcium daily% 15
Iron daily% 440

thanks
waterboy