NUTRITIONAL BAR BASED ON COCOA (Theobroma cacao L.) WITH NATURAL AGGLUTINANTS WITH NO ADDED SUGARS

Abstract

Cereal or nutritional bars are prepared products that can contain many nutrients, besides being very useful when there is little time to prepare something more elaborated (Aldaz & Tantaleán, 2019). This research's objective was to prepare a nutritional bar made from cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) using natural binders for food use, such as bee honey and mucilage honey. A completely randomized design was applied, resulting in eight treatments and six replicates. The sensory analysis was carried out with the different formulations by employing an acceptability test with a hedonic scale for semi-trained judges. To determine differences between means of the physicochemical analysis, the Tukey test was used (p ≤0.05). Furthermore, the nonparametric Kruskal Wallis test was applied to the sensory analysis, which resulted in T6 (cocoa 40% and mucilage honey 20%) as the best treatment, the microbiological analysis was performed on treatment T6 after five days of having made the product and it complies with the INEN 2085:2005 Standard for cookies or baked products, which indicates that it is suitable for human consumption. The economic analysis of the nutritional bars indicated that T6 in the 120g presentation had a production cost of $ 3.95 ctvs.