Updated May 10, 2026 at 11:23 AM EDT
Chocolate scientist Julien Simonis gazes upon 50 cacao beans that have just been sliced in half by something he calls "the guillotine." A distinctive aroma wafts upward. This is among the first steps in characterizing the quality of a particular cacao.
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In central Rome, Julien Simonis holds a tiny bar of chocolate made from cacao beans that originated in Hawaii. He cracks it into pieces before unwrapping the gold foil that surrounds it. Simonis places a morsel on his tongue and then breathes in through his mouth and out through his nose to heighten his perception of the chocolate's aroma and taste.
A look of reverence comes over him.
"My god," he whispers. "Each time I taste this, I'm always amazed. You have a boost of acidity. This burst of fresh flavors." Simonis detects a fruitiness and a hint of cardamom and nutmeg.
When he does the same thing with a bit of chocolate produced from cacao harvested on a Peruvian farm, he describes a flavor of raisins that gives way to a nuttiness. "It's extremely creamy," Simonis says.
Every cacao is different. "Cacao has an incredible amount of genetic variety," says Simonis. But for a long time, there wasn't a standard way of comparing the dizzying array of beans produced on farms across the tropics. This is unlike wine with its sommeliers or coffee with its Q graders — people who taste and systematically compare and rate those products using an internationally agreed-upon rubric.
But there were those in the chocolate biz who wanted to raise the bar. And so, in 2009, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, a sustainable agriculture nonprofit headquartered in Rome, started a program called Cacao of Excellence. And they asked Simonis — a chocolate scientist who now serves as program manager — to help them develop a standardized way of preparing and evaluating cacao.
"It's been revised, it's been adapted, it's been challenged," says Simonis.
It took years, but the team now has a process they stand behind — and Simons says that globally, several thousand producers, traders and stakeholders are using it each day.
Having such standards could do a lot for the cacao industry. "Harmonizing the way of talking about a food product," Simonis explains, allows buyers and sellers to review, discuss and appreciate the differences.
And this in turn could help persuade consumers to pay more for higher quality chocolate. Some of this money can find its way back to the farmers — and it could make a big difference, especially for those operating on smaller scales.
"A lot of the cacao producers live under the poverty limits," says Simonis. "There are a lot of economical challenges because a lot of the cacao producers are living in very rural, very inaccessible places." This applies across the board but is particularly true for the Ivory Coast and Ghana where more than half of the world's cacao is produced.
A transcendent transformation
The standardized processing of the cacao takes place at a lab tucked inside the Chocolate Experience Museum in hilly Perugia, about a hundred miles north of Rome.
To begin, lab assistant Julia Butac empties a burlap bag of beans into a bin and starts to sift them a couple handfuls at a time, removing anything that isn't a full bean. "It's really physical work," she says, acknowledging the rigorousness of the method.
Butac is from the Philippines and was never a huge chocolate fan, but this process has given her a deeper appreciation for it.
"To see the development of the flavor like fruit, nuts, spice, it satisfies you," she explains. Butac coos when she considers her relationship with the chocolate she works with each week. "Ooooh, it's my baby." she says. "I need to care, I need to look after it."
Butac proceeds to slice in half 50 of the beans nearly simultaneously with something akin to a guillotine. A chocolatey fragrance wafts into the air, mixed with notes of citrus. She records her impressions on a spreadsheet.
Next, Butac arranges a bunch of the beans on two trays and roasts them for a specific amount of time before separating the shells from the beans and then running the bean fragments, also known as nibs, through a mill. Each step further awakens the cacao into a fuller, more intoxicating version of itself.
Butac then cools the milled cacao, mixes in a precise amount of sugar and cocoa butter, and tempers it before pouring the resulting chocolate into a set of small molds.
She says that like people, each kind of cacao is special. "I'm discovering that they have different qualities," she says. "We have different qualities also."
Lifting up cacao and those who produce it
Those two chocolates that Simonis tasted — the one from Hawaii and the other from Peru — had been processed and prepared identically in Perugia. But they have two very different personalities.
"Just realize that the difference in these chocolates [is] only coming from the cacao bean," he says. "Despite the recipe being exactly the same, flavors are completely different."
Simonis relies on a panel of 15 trained professional tasters to evaluate a chocolate's unique blend of acidity, bitterness, astringency and more. The result is a standardized way of comparing chocolate, allowing cacao to be priced and valued according to its quality.
More and more people are joining the program. There's a charge for trainings and certification but access to resources including a step-by-step guide to cacao processing and the flavor wheel that the official tasters use to do their evaluations are free. "We are trying to work with every single producing country in the world," he adds.
That includes a rainy part of Thailand where Roong Kumpan founded TinTin Chocolate. He says joining the program, which also recognized his small family farm with an award, helped to raise their visibility. The team in Italy also showed Kumpan how to enhance his product by improving the fermentation and drying steps.
"Cacao of Excellence gives small producers a chance to be seen and recognized internationally, he says. "I believe it will help increase my income in the future."
In fact, some cacao producers have already seen improved revenue as a result of their involvement with the program. For instance, the Juan Laura farm in the forests of Peru has reported a 30% increase in sales. Rosaura Laura, who runs the operation, says the extra income is about more than just the money.
"I think this is a good way to dignify the laborers and change the mind of people regarding the farmers," she says, referring to the way in which farmers in general tend to be looked down upon in their country.
Above all, Laura believes that this effort is allowing cacao producers, buyers and consumers to speak the same language — one that's able to describe the magic of the beans that we coax into that other worldly stuff called chocolate.
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