Raw Cacao: What Does ‘Raw’ Actually Mean?

Every now and again somebody asks us a slightly awkward question: “Is your cacao raw?”

We say no. We roast our cacao. Occasionally this is followed by something along the lines of, “Oh… so it’s not as good as raw cacao?”

And therein lies a rather interesting problem.

We’ve been working with cacao for many years. We import fermented organic cacao beans directly from African farmer Co-op’s, roast them to our specifications, make chocolate from them, press cacao butter and mill our own cacao powder. And the longer we’ve worked directly with cacao, the less comfortable we’ve become with the term “raw cacao”.

Not because genuinely unroasted cacao cannot exist. It certainly can. The problem is that raw has gradually become a marketing term that seems to imply better, healthier, purer, less processed or more premium cacao — without necessarily telling us very much at all about what actually happened to the cacao.

So we thought it was time to unpack it.

Where did “raw cacao” come from?

Around 15 years ago, the raw-food movement was in full swing. South Africa had a lively raw and raw-vegan food community, as did the UK, USA, Australia and many other countries. We were part of that broader movement ourselves.

A lot of good came from it: eating more whole foods, questioning highly processed ingredients, thinking more carefully about where our food came from and recognising that more processing isn’t necessarily better. There were also ideas and claims that became rather less convincing when examined more closely.

One of the terms that survived that period remarkably well is raw cacao.

Originally, raw was intended to mean something fairly specific: food shouldn’t have been heated beyond a particular temperature. Exactly what that temperature was depended on whom you asked. You’d hear 42°C, 45°C, 47°C, 48°C and various points in between.

We could spend the rest of this article debating whether a cacao bean at 46°C is raw while one at 48°C has suddenly become cooked. We’re not going to.

Because today we think something rather different has happened. For most consumers, raw has quietly become a quality claim. Put RAW CACAO on one packet and simply CACAO on another, and there is an implication that the first is somehow the better product.

And that’s the part we want to challenge.

Cacao isn’t actually very “raw” to begin with

Chocolate doesn’t begin with a dry brown bean. Cacao pods are harvested and opened and the beans, surrounded by their sweet white fruit pulp, are removed and fermented.

Fermentation is enormously important to developing chocolate flavour. It’s also biologically active and generates considerable heat. Temperatures during cacao fermentation commonly climb well into the 40s and can approach or exceed some of those old raw-food temperature limits. The beans are then dried — traditionally in the tropical sun — before being bagged, stored and transported.

So long before anyone deliberately roasts anything, our cacao has already undergone fermentation, significant chemical transformation and heat. Does naturally generated fermentation heat count? Does lying in tropical sunshine count?

Interesting questions, perhaps, but we don’t think they’re the most useful ones. There is a much clearer distinction available.

Was it roasted?

Unlike raw, roasted is fairly easy to understand. A deliberate roasting stage either happened or it didn’t.

Roasting develops many of the characteristic flavours and aromas we associate with chocolate. It changes acidity and astringency, reduces moisture and transforms numerous compounds within the bean. And, critically, it performs another job that doesn’t receive nearly as much attention in romantic discussions about cacao: roasting is an important food-safety step.

This is where the conversation about genuinely unroasted cacao gets considerably more serious.

Before roasting, cacao is a raw agricultural ingredient

Think for a moment about the journey of a cacao bean. It grows inside a fruit on a farm in a tropical environment. The pod is opened, the beans are removed and fermented, usually relatively close to where they were harvested. They’re subsequently dried, handled, bagged, stored, transported and eventually shipped around the world.

That’s completely normal. It’s also agriculture. And raw agricultural products can carry microorganisms.

For cacao, one of the organisms of particular concern is Salmonella. The US FDA recognises cocoa beans and cocoa products as susceptible to Salmonella contamination, and outbreaks of salmonellosis have historically been associated with cocoa and chocolate.

More strikingly, a 2024 study tested 870 samples of raw cacao beans from major sourcing regions. Salmonella was detected in 71 of them — about 8%.

For us as food manufacturers, that’s not something we can simply ignore.

Drying isn’t necessarily the answer either. Salmonella can survive in low-moisture foods; removing the water needed for active bacterial growth doesn’t necessarily mean the organism has disappeared. This is one of the reasons roasting has traditionally been such an important part of chocolate manufacture.

So if someone tells us their cacao really is unroasted, our first response isn’t, “Wonderful! It must be healthier.” It’s more likely to be:

Okay. So what was the validated food-safety step?

That’s not intended as a “gotcha”. It’s a genuine manufacturing question. There are alternatives to conventional roasting and different ways of treating cacao during processing. But if you’re going to remove the conventional microbial reduction step, you need to know what has replaced it and whether it actually works.

Oddly enough, genuinely producing “raw” cacao responsibly may therefore require more care and control, not less.

So is the “raw cacao” in our shops actually unroasted?

This is where things become murky.

We can only speak from our own experience, and we certainly haven’t investigated every packet of cacao available in South Africa. But at the time of writing, we aren’t aware of a commercially available cacao product in South Africa labelled “raw cacao” that we have personally been able to establish is genuinely unroasted.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t one. If somebody is producing genuinely unroasted cacao safely and transparently, we’d actually be fascinated to know about it.

What we have encountered are products labelled raw that taste, to us, very clearly roasted. We’ve even supplied our own roasted cacao to other businesses who subsequently describe products made from it as “raw”. We tell them that our cacao is roasted. What they subsequently put on their packaging is obviously beyond our control.

But it illustrates rather nicely how far the word raw has sometimes drifted from describing an actual manufacturing process.

When is roasting not roasting?

We had another interesting experience some years ago while working with an imported cacao product marketed as raw. As the manufacturer using the ingredient, we needed to satisfy ourselves that it was microbiologically safe, so we asked the supplier a simple question: if this cacao hasn’t been roasted, what process makes it safe to eat?

Getting a clear answer proved surprisingly difficult.

Eventually we obtained more detailed processing information. The cacao had undergone two processes described using terminology that, on the surface, didn’t sound like roasting. One was essentially a hygiene or sanitation process; another was associated with improving flavour.

Once we got into the actual processing details, both involved heating at around 120°C.

Whatever one chooses to call those processes, 120°C is not particularly raw. And twice is even less so.

We’re not mentioning the manufacturer because that’s not really the point. We’re also describing something that happened some years ago and processes may change. The lesson for us was simply this: the terminology doesn’t matter nearly as much as the process.

Calling a heating stage something other than roasting doesn’t make the heat disappear.

Is raw cacao nutritionally better?

This is another rabbit hole we could disappear down, so we’ll keep it brief.

Heat and processing certainly alter cacao. Fermentation alters it. Drying alters it. Roasting alters it. Grinding and alkalisation alter it. Some heat-sensitive compounds can be reduced by processing, and different roasting conditions can affect polyphenols and other components differently.

But the neat little equation raw = more nutrients = healthier = better simply doesn’t follow.

Food quality is considerably more complicated than retaining the maximum possible quantity of every heat-sensitive compound. Safety matters. Flavour matters. Agricultural quality matters. Fermentation matters. And how the cacao is subsequently processed matters.

Which brings us to another oddity in the raw discussion.

Our cacao isn’t “raw” — but we process it remarkably gently

Once cacao beans become chocolate, cacao powder or cacao butter, there are many more processing decisions to make. At industrial scale, cacao can pass through large grinders, refiners, presses and other equipment. Cacao butter may subsequently be refined and deodorised, while cacao powder may be alkalised or “Dutched” to alter its colour, acidity, flavour and how it behaves in food and drinks.

At Earthshine we take a rather different approach.

We do roast our beans, so we don’t call the resulting cacao powder or cacao butter raw. But after roasting, our processing is extremely gentle.

We make our own cacao mass, press our cacao butter ourselves in small batches of roughly 10 kg without adding heat during pressing, and mill the resulting press cake here into our own cacao powder. We don’t deodorise our cacao butter and we don’t Dutch or alkalise our cacao powder.

The result is cacao powder and butter that retain a tremendous amount of the character of the original bean.

So here’s an interesting question. Imagine one cacao product made from carefully sourced beans that have been properly fermented and roasted, then gently processed in small batches without alkalisation or deodorisation. Beside it is another product with RAW CACAO written across the packet, but about whose actual manufacturing process we know very little.

Which is the more premium product?

We don’t think the word raw gives us enough information to answer that.

And what about “cacao” versus “cocoa”?

While we’re upsetting perfectly good marketing terminology, we might as well deal with this one too.

Over the past couple of decades, cacao has increasingly become associated with premium, natural or minimally processed products, while cocoa is more often associated with conventional cocoa powder, baking cocoa and drinking chocolate.

But there isn’t a neat technical dividing line between the words. International food standards themselves use cocoa and cacao in ways that overlap. Changing the o to an a doesn’t tell you whether the beans were roasted, how they were processed or whether the powder was alkalised.

At Earthshine we nevertheless generally use the word cacao. Why? Because language evolves, and in today’s market cacao does communicate something useful to many consumers about the kind of product they’re looking for.

For us, we associate it with good-quality cacao, carefully sourced and processed and — particularly when we’re talking about cacao powder — a natural, non-alkalised product. But that’s our usage. It isn’t a universal technical definition.

We’d rather tell you specifically that our cacao powder isn’t alkalised than hope that changing one letter somehow communicates the entire manufacturing process.

So what actually makes great cacao?

For us, this is where things get much more interesting.

Forget the magic word on the front of the packet for a moment. Where was the cacao grown? How was it farmed? What genetics and varieties are involved? Was it harvested properly? Was it well fermented and carefully dried? How were the beans selected and stored?

How were they roasted? Was the roasting appropriate to that particular bean? How was the cacao subsequently processed? If it’s powder, was it alkalised? If it’s butter, was it deodorised? And can the people selling it actually tell you what happened to it?

Then perhaps the most important question of all: does it taste fantastic?

Because cacao is ultimately food, not a nutritional spreadsheet.

For us, great cacao has complexity and character. Different origins taste different. Different fermentations taste different. Different roast profiles taste different. We’d much rather preserve and celebrate those differences than chase a single marketing word.

So we’re going to make some genuinely unroasted chocolate

After years of talking about this, curiosity has finally got the better of us. We’re going to make some.

When our next suitable batch of beans arrives, we’ll put aside approximately 10 kg and conduct a small internal experiment using genuinely unroasted cacao.

We’re not simply going to grind untreated agricultural beans into chocolate and start eating them. We’ll experiment with an ozone washing process followed by low-temperature dehydration, and then send the treated beans to an independent laboratory for comprehensive microbiological testing.

Only if we’re satisfied with those results will we grind them and make chocolate.

This isn’t a commercial product. We won’t be selling it, and we’re certainly not suggesting that our experimental ozone process is a validated replacement for conventional cacao roasting. We’re simply curious.

What does genuinely unroasted chocolate actually taste like?

We have our suspicions. But it’s always dangerous to conduct an experiment when you’ve already decided what the answer should be.

So we’ll make it, test it and taste it. And we’ll keep a few bars.

If you’re sufficiently cacao-nerdy to have read this far, you’re welcome to pop in and ask us about the experiment. Assuming everything passes the laboratory testing, you might even get to taste some.

Maybe “raw” isn’t the question we should be asking

We’re not suggesting that the term raw cacao should disappear. Genuinely unroasted cacao can exist.

If somebody can explain where their beans came from, confirm that they weren’t roasted, explain how microbiological safety was achieved and substantiate the processing claims, then raw cacao may be a perfectly reasonable description.

What we’d like to challenge is something much simpler:

RAW does not automatically mean BETTER.

Nor does roasted mean inferior, excessively processed or nutritionally empty.

A beautifully grown and fermented cacao bean, carefully roasted to develop its flavour, made microbiologically safe and then gently processed into chocolate, cacao powder or cacao butter can be an extraordinary food. And a mediocre cacao bean doesn’t magically become premium because somebody prints RAW on the packet.

After many years of working with cacao, we’ve become much more interested in transparency than terminology.

So perhaps instead of simply asking, “Is it raw?”, ask where it came from. Ask how it was fermented. Ask whether it was roasted — and if it genuinely wasn’t, ask how it was made microbiologically safe. Ask whether the powder was alkalised, whether the butter was deodorised and how the cacao was processed.

And then, finally, taste it.

Because those answers will tell you considerably more about the quality of your cacao than one rather slippery three-letter word ever could.