FROM BEAN TO POC
nourished in perfect harmony
from bean to bar, from taste to human
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- Roasting
Roasting is the first part of the chocolate-making process once the cocoa beans arrive at our factory. As we source high-quality cocoa, our aim is to retain as much of the cocoa bean’s inherent flavor as possible throughout the roasting process – this means we make roasting very easy using an automatic roaster. The main purposes of roasting are to heat the beans to evaporate the moisture and acid, loosen the skins, and kill any bacteria that may be present. During a typical production day, you can smell the chocolate aromas of roasted cocoa even before you step into our factory.
- The Winnowing
Winnowing is the process by which the shell is removed from the cocoa beans.
Each grain is surrounded by a thin husk, which must be removed before grinding.
In the first phase, the winnower gently cracks each cocoa bean, then the husk and nibs vibrate towards vacuum cleaners, which suck up the light husk and the denser nibs are collected as they fall into a bucket. During pouring, we lose between 25-30% of the weight of the cocoa beans, which means that if we buy 100 kilograms of cocoa, we end up with only about 75 kilograms of cocoa mass. Due to the intense vibration and high suction power, our blower is our most powerful machine and can be heard throughout the factory during operation.
- Pre-grinding and fine-grinding
In the pre-grinding process, we use mills with granite stones for crushing the cocoa nibs. Cocoa nibs immediately become a chocolate paste, exactly the same way peanut butter is made. First, we will fill each mill with pre-ground nibs, then we will complete the recipe with the sugar that needs to be added. Since there is no moisture in the chocolate, the sugar will not dissolve on its own as it does with baking. We rely on rotating born mill to crush the sugar down to about half the size of a normal sugar particle. The grinding and mixing phase takes about 2 hours.
- Refinement
To uniformly refine all cocoa and sugar particles down to about 20 microns, we use our ball mill, Sphere 50 – a tank of about 50kg, a vane pump with a heating/cooling system, with recirculation of about 1200 kg/h, and hundreds of stainless steel balls, which make the refining process last only a few hours. We rely on the steel balls from Sfera 50 so that the chocolate mass becomes smooth.
- Consciousness
The chocolate mass and cocoa butter are introduced into a tank with mechanical arms, where the most intense possible agitation with air takes place, thus eliminating the volatile acids, and the humidity drops below 1%. The curing time and temperature depend on the specific properties of the raw material used and the quality of the finished product to be obtained. By lowering the temperature, a smooth, homogeneous appearance is obtained, with a pleasing aroma and pleasant taste.
- Tempering, modeling, and cooling
Before modeling, the chocolate is introduced into tempering machines, to be brought to the optimal temperature for forming crystallization centers in the cocoa butter. Chocolate is a lot like water – above a certain temperature it becomes liquid, and below a certain temperature, it can start to crystallize. After going through this step, we inject molds with liquid chocolate and place them on the vibrating table.
By shaking the molds, any air bubbles are removed from the chocolate mass, which at the same time perfectly fills the molds, then we send it through our cooling tunnel to solidify.
A perfectly tempered and cooled chocolate bar will release from the mold, be shiny, snap when broken, be shelf-stable, and melt perfectly in your mouth.
- Packaging
The chocolate tablets are manually removed from the molds and placed in the Flow Pack packaging machine, which performs three seals for increased protection
The chocolate in protective foil is placed in the outer packaging, inscribed with the name of the assortment and the data regarding the nutritional value of the product, the name of the producer, and the product’s expiration date.