Independent Cut Test
The cut test
The cut test is how the industry judges fermentation: slice open 100 beans, count and grade them. Fully brown is the target colour. Fissuring — the cracked internal structure of a well-fermented bean — is graded 1 to 4, with 4 the highest.
Four monitored batches and four fermented traditionally were sent to a third-party professional cacao bean grading authority. GOcacao did not conduct or supervise the evaluation.
Beans per 100 — a 20.3% improvement.
Evaluation Protocol
Each bean in the sample is cut and classified — fully brown, partially fermented, or defective — and fissuring is graded. The fully brown count and the grade 4 fissuring count are the two indicators buyers, exporters and craft producers use internationally.
EVALUATOR — Third-party cacao bean grading authorityMETHOD — Standard cut test, 100 beans per batch
SAMPLE — 4 monitored vs 4 traditional
FULLY BROWN — 87.25 vs 72.5 beans per 100 (+20.3%)
GRADE 4 FISSURING — 85 beans GOcacao vs 69 traditional (+23.2%)
CONSISTENCY — 10.17% CV GOcacao vs 22.67% traditional (−55.2%)
DURATION — 7% shorter ferment
STATUS — Independent, unsupervised evaluation
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