Estimated daily intake and risk of prevailing acrylamide content of alkalized roasted cocoa beans

Abstract

Abstract The consistency of the brown color, flavor and dispersability of cocoa solids is the goal of a successful Dutching process of cocoa masse. However, acrylamide, a known probable carcinogen which is one of the by-products of browning reactions, is linked to the strength of alkalis used in the Dutching process. This study used Response Surface D-optimal, 20 experimental runs to determine acrylamide content of beans after using treatment factors; temperature (110–160 °C), time (20–50 min) and K2CO3 (10–70% w/v). Subsequently, the alkalized cocoa masses were treated to obtain extracts containing acrylamide using QuEChERS method. The concentrations of the acrylamide were determined using HPLC after which the data was processed by fitting a cubic process order followed by diagnostics to remove outliers. The results yielded optimized process conditions of treatment to yield low acrylamide content, which was later validated to be 7.7 × 10−2 mg/g, at alkali concentration of 29.17% and roasting temperature - time system of 110 °C and 20 min respectively. Though the validated acrylamide content was relatively lower than what has been reported in some European markets, it was found to be still high relative to other markets. This suggest that the application of K2CO3 could hold promise of lowering acrylamide concentrations. However, after exposure studies, the validated acrylamide yielded a probable risk of ‘4 in 1000’ adults and ‘2 in 100’ young children consumers of chocolate products, which were highly unacceptable relative to the deminimis (‘1 in 1,000,000’). Thus, based on the deminimis risk, further control measures must be sought to produce safer alkalized cocoa masse.