We interviewed Prof. Matthias Ullrich (left) and Gino Vrancken (right) on the status quo of the COMETA project.

The first thing the research team at Jacobs University needed to do was to get an idea of the scope of the project. It quickly became evident that it would go beyond what they had done before, according to Ullrich. “Raw cocoa is made up of something like twenty thousand molecules. When processing the bean, this complexity only increases. We don't know why. Biologically speaking, cocoa is one of a kind - not even its closest nephews are as complex, or behave the way cacao does. So that became the aim of the project: to understand everything about cocoa, to know which molecules interact with which other molecules, and why. Our goal is to understand how cocoa behaves in every step of the process - from the raw beans to the fermentation stage, to the roasting, grinding, alkalization phase and all this across hundreds of cocoa samples from across the world, and at the highest level of detail. If we succeed, we will understand how different processes along the way affect important quality characteristics of the end product - like color, or taste.”

“We have made great progress with one kind of pre-cursors, namely the proteins,” Gino Vrancken adds. “But there are still others left to be mapped in great detail: the fats, sugars and polyphenols for example. And we talked about fermentation. But further down the chain there are so many other processing steps to which cocoa is subjected. We also want to understand how the precursors to key quality characteristics are impacted through the drying, roasting, alkalization, grinding, etc. of cocoa. Having said this, we have quite a bit of work facing us in the next 4.5 years.”

But true to form, while cocoa is offering up answers to some questions, it's also raising more questions and surprises according to Vrancken. “What amazes me is that, of the twenty thousand molecules that we have now identified in cocoa, about three-fourths of them are polyphenols that were unknown to science. Mind you, we have studied polyphenols in depth at Barry Callebaut, so this is not unknown territory to us. Thus I would have been surprised to learn that we found ten or twenty new polyphenols. Instead, we are finding thousands. We have no clue why this is - why this plant is going so insane. The thing about polyphenols is that they are highly reactive, so we know that they might have an impact on the taste of the product in the end. And we don't know a single one of them, let alone how they interact!”

“For me, there are two major surprises in this research,” says Prof. Ullrich. “First is the level of detail that we are achieving. If we compare our research with the research that others have done before us, the resolution that we are getting is truly groundbreaking. Another surprise is the importance of fermentation. We see differences in composition of the beans, even when the beans look exactly the same. There is probably a lot we can learn about fermentation in this project.”

What is Mass Spectronomy?

Prof. Ullrich explains, “A mass spectrometer identifies chemicals in a substance (so, in our case, the cocoa bean) by their mass. The particles of the substance are ionized, that is (we give them a positive or negative charge.) And we then beam them – so to speak – through an electromagnetic field. The manner in which they end up being deflected is indicative of their mass, thus, of their identity. There are animated clips on YouTube that give you a pretty good impression of the process, I especially like this one that uses a hairdryer to start explaining the process.”