Study of Sc-CO2 extraction of cacao bean shell fat and determination of characteristics

Cacao is the main raw material for chocolate production. Cacao mass, cacao butter and cacao powder is produced from cacao beans. During the production cacao bean shells are produced as a by-product and sell as animal feed or use as fuel material. But cacao bean shells are include cacao butter at 4,15% ratio. According to fat ratio of cacao bean shells, cacao butter should be extract without any trace of solvent because of standards. Standards said that cocoa butter should not include any solvent for use in food industry. Therefore supercritical extraction method is fit the standards when co-solvent is not used during extraction. Yield of SCE-CO2 extraction is affected by temperature, pressure, time, flow rate of CO2 and particule size. At Önem Gıda San. Tic. A.Ş., cacao bean shell is broken with winnowing process which seperates the shell and cacao nib with vacuum and sieving. There is 5 sieving size. Cacao butter ratio is determined by soxhlet method depend on sieving size. The cacao bean shells samples that are gathered from the 5th sieve, have the highest fat ratio as 12,98%. Regarding to this result, research is focused on the 5th sieving cacao bean shells. Process parameters of SCE-CO2 are generated with response surface method depends on 4 factors (pressure,time,temperature and flow rate). Extracted cacao butter samples' fatty acid compositions, phenolic compunds and antioxidant capacity results are compared with raw cacao butter that is generated with traditional method.