International Confectionery Magazine, January 2023 — Clay Gordon

Scaling Chocolate Production

Technical Editor Clay Gordon visits the CocoaSupply / Chocolatier S.A. factory in Durán, Guayaquil, Ecuador — and explores what it means to scale down.

One of the attractions of becoming a craft chocolate maker is that start-up capital costs can be quite low compared with many other businesses. Setting aside business formation and related build-out, licensing, and marketing costs, all that is required is a means for roasting, cracking and winnowing, grinding, refining, tempering, some moulds, some beans and sugar, and wrapping materials.

A bare bones setup (not considering ingredients) can cost as little as US$2,500 to test the waters at a hobbyist level while taking advantage of what are called “cottage food” laws in the US. There are many ways to scale into larger production and the most popular for small craft chocolate makers is to upsize the roaster, get a larger cracker and winnower, add more melangeurs, and move from hand or batch tempering to a continuous tempering machine with depositing capabilities. These upgrades can cost from under US$10,000 to well over $35,000 or more.

For most craft chocolate makers, the primary mode of production is always going to be batch oriented, not continuous. While there are many differences between the two, the most important from an equipment perspective is materials handling — how beans move from roaster to cracker to winnower to refiner, and so on.

What is less-often discussed is scaling down production. I had the opportunity during a recent trip to Ecuador to visit one such situation in Durán, a suburb of Guayaquil.

The Carvajal family has been involved in cocoa in Ecuador for over a century — first as growers in the early 1900s, and then, since the 1970s under the guidance of Jose Carvajal, as cocoa processor Cafiesa (Cacaos Finos Ecuatorianos), producing both derivatives (nibs, liquor, butter, and powder) as well as finished chocolate.

The capacity of the Cafiesa plant is approximately 300 MT per month, but it has a fundamental design constraint: in order to do anything, the entire plant must be turned on, requiring a huge amount of energy — much of it diesel fuel. This leads to an MOQ (minimum order quantity) of 10 MT. This is fine for large industrial customers, but that demand is cyclical based on market prices for beans, butter, and powder that are beyond Cafiesa’s control. And in a rapidly changing market, there are many customers Cafiesa simply cannot serve competitively.

“This top-to-bottom rethinking of the business meant building a new plant in a separate, nearby, facility that is physically smaller and more efficient.”

Generational change — Jose passing the family business to daughter Leila — included a spirited discussion of the requirement to transition from serving large industrial customers to meeting the needs of a broader base of new, smaller customers. In the end, the decision was made to rethink the entire production process, reducing overall capacity while modularising production to enable a “semi-batch” processing model.

CocoaSupply: A New Model

This makes it possible for the new business — CocoaSupply (cocoasupply.com), also known as Chocolatier S.A. in Ecuador — to produce up to 100 MT per month in a combination of conventional and organically-certified derivatives, with an MOQ of between 500–600 kg. Finished chocolates were dropped from the product line to eliminate cross-contamination with allergens. (CocoaSupply maintains relationships with manufacturing partners in Ecuador to transform their cocoa liquor and butter into finished chocolates for customers who want products produced from the same beans.)

This reconfiguration of manufacturing capacity means that cold-start costs are significantly reduced. If a customer only requires nibs, the equipment downstream from the cracker and winnower does not need to be turned on. If the customer requires liquor, the butter and powder manufacturing modules do not need to be activated. This is where the semi-batch design approach comes to the forefront — it is possible to operate the entire line in a continuous process, but parts of the line can be operated as batch processes, making it possible to intervene between steps for sensorial or other analyses.

While the original Cafiesa facility operates on a mix of electricity and (mostly) diesel, the new facility’s design reduced the need for fossil fuels to near zero. Solar panel installation began in 2022. When complete, this eliminates the need for burning fossil fuels entirely, while reducing reliance on the national grid and reducing overall energy costs — which helps keep prices to customers from fluctuating wildly.

Equipment & Factory Design

Reconfiguring the plant required customising much of the equipment — a mashup of new machines from China and new and used machines from established European vendors. One of the most striking examples of modification is a vintage Bauermeister cracker/winnower, originally designed to produce three or more usable fractions of nibs plus fines, now customised to produce a single fraction plus fines. This required rethinking everything from how the beans are cracked to how the shells and nibs are separated.

Much of this mechanical customisation is based on Jose’s 50+ years of cocoa processing and chocolate manufacturing experience, buttressed by his graduate studies in mechanical engineering in Germany. An engineer at heart, Jose has been constantly tinkering and innovating, modifying and adapting equipment and processes.

Everything starts outdoors with bean reception and cleaning/destoning. From here, beans are transferred indoors via conveyors to a pre-roaster — the purpose of which is to make it easier to separate the shell from the nib during cracking and winnowing. The modified cracker, redesigned to be highly adjustable, enables customers to specify the size of the nibs they are looking for.

The clean nib is then transferred by conveyor to a batch roaster where nibs can be roasted according to customer-defined roast profiles. Given the modularity of the factory’s design, even nib roasting is optional. From there, nibs are transferred mechanically to another room with multiple liquor grinding stations.

From the grinders, the liquor is sent to holding tanks that act as a buffer. From these tanks, liquor can be pumped to one of the two hydraulic pot presses — moved over from the old Cafiesa factory — or pumped to a tempering/depositing/cooling station. Natural butter from the press is sent to a set of settling and holding tanks and filter presses, from where it can be tempered/deposited or run through a heavily modified small deodorising plant that relies on vacuum instead of harsh chemicals to remove unwanted volatiles.

Press cake from the butter press drops into a cake breaker which feeds a pin mill to turn the kibbled cake into powder. The output goes to another room where the powder is cooled and sieved, and from there can optionally make a detour through an alkalising plant before being packaged.

Access to all parts of the factory is through a long hallway along one end of the building. This makes it easy to access the rooms where each process is conducted without having to walk product through each room in succession — reducing the possibility of cross-contamination. The hallway also provides access to the finished goods warehouse, on-site quality control labs, changing rooms, offices, and reception. The roof of the finished goods warehouse will be covered with solar panels.

Sometimes Bigger Is Not Better

While a great deal of time and ink is spent talking about how craft chocolate makers can scale production, not nearly as much time is spent thinking through the implications and benefits of scaling down.

In the case of CocoaSupply, the benefits include greatly increased manufacturing and scheduling flexibility, which improves their ability to meet the demands of changing markets while consuming significantly less energy, especially fossil fuels.

This flexibility in manufacturing has another impact: the ability to work with much smaller producers. Not many smallholders can produce 10 MT of cocoa — the MOQ required to start up the old Cafiesa factory. In that case, the only option is to blend beans from many producers. While this is the status quo for industrial customers, many of CocoaSupply’s new customers are looking to work with beans from individual smallholders. The much smaller MOQ of 500–600 kg means CocoaSupply can open up a world of opportunities for smallholder producers, smaller customers, and themselves that were simply out of reach before.

Sometimes bigger is not better.