Abstract
Compared with other fermentation processes in food industry, cocoa bean fermentation is uncontrolled and not standardized. A detailed mechanistic understanding can therefore be relevant for cocoa bean quality control. Starting from an existing mathematical model of cocoa bean fermentation we analyse five additional biochemical mechanisms derived from the literature. These mechanisms, when added to the baseline model either in isolation or in combination, were evaluated in terms of their capacity to describe experimental data. In total, we evaluated 32 model variants on 23 fermentation datasets. We interpret the results from two perspectives: (1) success of the potential mechanism, (2) discrimination of fermentation protocols based on estimated parameters. The former provides insight in the fermentation process itself. The latter opens an avenue towards reverse-engineering empirical conditions from model parameters. We find support for two mechanisms debated in the literature: consumption of fructose by lactic acid bacteria and production of acetic acid by yeast. Furthermore, we provide evidence that model parameters are sensitive to differences in the cultivar, temperature control and usage of steel tanks compared with wooden boxes. Our results show that mathematical modelling can provide an alternative to standard chemical fingerprinting in the interpretation of fermentation data.
Highlights
Cocoa beans from Theobroma cacao L. are the raw material of chocolate
A number of nine datasets reported by Lefeber et al [51,52], Moreira et al [18], Bastos et al [53] and Racine et al [54] were not possible to fit with any model iteration (MI) at all
The mechanisms discussed here have shown in most cases that their stand-alone and concomitant inclusion in the baseline model lead to convincing observed success rate (OSR) values, in particular for mechanism 2 (M2), Mechanism 3 (M3) and M4
Summary
Cocoa beans from Theobroma cacao L. are the raw material of chocolate. Their fermentation plays a fundamental role as being responsible for eliminating undesired properties from freshly harvested beans, e.g. astringency and bitterness, besides yielding chocolate-related flavour and aroma precursor compounds [1,2]. Spontaneous form varying in both, methodology, e.g. wooden boxes, heaps and platforms [2–4], and observed 2 microbial diversity [5]. This heterogeneity due to different fermentation methods and indigenous microbiota, leads to a plethora of studies that have qualitatively described the process, e.g. Sequentiality of microbial populations thriving on the beans’ enclosing pulp constitutes the process dynamics with greatest acceptance [1,2,4]
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