When many people think of making chocolate, they imagine going straight to the tin of cacao powder in their pantry. Few people realize though that cacao powder is an industrial derivative, missing some of the most important nutritional benefits of whole food chocolate.

Ceremonial cacao is a whole food, made from premium whole cacao beans with nothing added or removed, and with minimal processing. Cocoa powder, in contrast, has had the cocoa butter removed from it. Both of these derivatives, cocoa powder and cocoa butter, are typically made from the lowest quality cacao beans. These cacao beans are typically roasted at very high temperatures, then shelled and ground. Then they are high pressure processed to extract cocoa butter from the cacao paste. Lastly the cocoa powder is hammered into fine particles. Ironically, this process is done primarily to obtain cocoa butter, which is a high value natural fat used in cosmetics and expensive foods, and it is of much higher value than cocoa powder. The cocoa powder is a byproduct which is then marketed as a superfood!

For “Fair Trade” cacao, this model is essentially unchanged except the cacao is sold with a 10% premium, and a separate paper trail is maintained. Often the supply chains for commodity cacao are so complex, that the chocolate company purchasing the cacao beans doesn’t even know and couldn’t figure out if it wanted to, who farms the cacao that it uses. This lack of transparency can lead to troubling violations of common sense ethics in the supply chain, like slavery and child labor. Fortunately this is typically addressed by the additional paperwork of Fair Trade, but you can see how the 10% premium paid for cacao quickly gets lost in the long supply chain.