Fortunato Chocolate FAQ - Toxic Heavy Metals?
Today, I would like to continue answering the frequently asked questions we’ve received about the return of our 1.1-pound bars, which haven't been available for the last year and a half.
As a reminder, if you haven’t already pre-ordered the 1.1-pound bars, you can do so here: https://fortunatochocolate.
If you have already placed a pre-order, thank you, most sincerely from the bottom of my heart.
We can’t do our work without you.
Please keep reading, though, as this information might mean something to you.
Is our chocolate free of toxic heavy metals?
The short answer is yes, but for better or worse, I am not so hot at settling for short answers.
It is a weakness of mine.
You may be aware of studies that came out a few years back showing that many of the most popular American chocolate brands contain unhealthy levels of toxic heavy metals.
The two metals most commonly found were cadmium and lead.
I don't have space to list the ailments caused by excessive consumption of these metals, but the list is long and frightening.
Here is a bit of irony.
Cacao is one of the most heart-friendly foods, packed with vitamins and minerals you can’t find elsewhere, and with ten to forty times the antioxidants of blueberries.
But the same mechanism that makes cacao a nutritional powerhouse, also makes it susceptible to heavy metal absorption.
Cacao trees are prolific at sucking up what is in the soil.
If the soil is healthy, cacao seeds will be more nutrient-dense than almost any other food.
However, if there is a high concentration of metal in the soil, it will suck that up too.
This is one the ways in which heavy metals end up in chocolate.
To explain the second prominent cause, I feel I need to go take a relevant detour, which I promise will eventually relate to heavy metals.
For cacao to taste like chocolate, it needs to be fermented in the sweet mucilage that surrounds its seeds inside the pod.
To make fine-flavored chocolate, cacao must be fermented in a meticulous, specialized way.
My brother Brian lived in the jungle and practiced cacao fermentation for almost two years before we made a single sale.
We knew we had to master the tecnhnique if we wanted to make chocolate that tastes as good as possible.
After fermentation, cacao dries under the sun before being bagged in burlap sacks for export.
Most of the world’s cacao is fermented and dried by individual cacao farmers on their farms.
This fact alone makes most cacao unsuitable, flavor-wise, for fine-flavored chocolate.
The problem here is inconsistency and a lack of incentive.
I'm getting to how this relates to heavy metals, I promise.
If a poverty-stricken cacao farmer doesn’t get a price premium for doing a good job of fermentation and drying, they’ll neglect it because their economics dictate that they spend their time on other activities that better help them make ends meet.
Thousands of cacao farmers independtly choosing to do whatever suits their fancy is a poor setup for producing consistently excellent chocolate.
Here is where heavy metal contamination comes into play.
Much of the world’s cacao is dried on the ground near a busy road.
Why?
It takes a lot less effort and investment in instrumentation for a cacao farmer to fling cacao down on a tarp next to the main road where the cacao is going to be picked up.
Constant exposure to old vehicle exhaust, the hazardous cargo transported along busy roads, dirt, dust, rocks, pieces of asphalt, hubcaps, chunks of tires, and all kinds of other debris, contaminate ground-dried cacao.
Curious animals and creepy crawlies infiltrate ground dried cacao as well.
All of the cacao we use in our chocolate is fermented and dried in our company-owned and operated centralized processing facility.
Our team transports cacao from farms to our facility, and we do the fermentation and drying ourselves to ensure consistency and superior processing.
We dry our cacao on custom built, raised dryer beds, designed for proper airflow, far from where it will be exposed to vehicle and industrial contamination, and where no animals can snoop around in it.
It didn’t occur to us back in 2009, when we exported our first container of cacao, that it would be important someday, but our Swiss chocolate-making partner, Max Felchlin AG, has tested every single lot of our cacao for heavy metal contamination since our very first batch of chocolate.
That was long before heavy metals in chocolate became a newsworthy issue here in the United States.
We’ve been regulated under European Union laws since the very beginning, which are much more stringent than American laws.
This is one of the benefits of making our chocolate in Switzerland, where we always make our 1.1-pound bars.
We are forced to do heavy metal testing on every single lot of cacao.
We’ll post the test results online for this year's cacao harvest as soon as they are available, probably around September of this year.
We’ve bought cacao from the same farms for the last 17 years, and neither the soil nor our process has changed.
As such, we expect very similar results.
Before signing off, I'd like to share something, in the name of full transparency.
It is virtually impossible for cacao, or any food for that matter, to be completely free of metals.
Almost all soil has at least trace amounts of cadmium, lead, or both.
These metals are part of what make up the Earth's crust.
EU488/2014, the strictest law of its type in the world, establishes the maximum levels of cadmium that chocolate and cocoa powder can have in European Union countries.
The EU maximum cadmium level for chocolate is 0.8mg/kg.
Testing has consistently showed that our 68% dark chocolate has only 0.1mg/kg of cadmium, just one eighth of the world's most stringent limit.
Our milk chocolates have even less.
Although the EU does not have a specific limit for lead, Max Felchlin AG also performs a polymetallic test for lead and arsenic.
One of the strictest standards in the world regulating lead levels in food is California's maximum allowable dose level (MADL) for lead, which is 0.5 micrograms per kilo.
Our test results consistently show the lead level in our chocolate as .01 micrograms per kilo, 98 percent below California's strict limit.
A microgram is one millionth of a gram by the way.
So, the answer to the frequently asked question as to whether our chocolate is free of toxic heavy metals is yes.
The heavy metal amounts in the cacao we use are far below even the most conservative safety limits and don’t come anywhere near toxic levels.
I was hoping to answer more than one question.
So much for that.
I really need to work on keeping it succinct.
Maybe next time around.
Here is the link again to pre-order our Swiss-made 1.1-pound bars: https://fortunatochocolate.
If you have any questions, please let me know by replying to this email or calling me using the phone number below.
Thank you so much for your time.
Have a great day.
Best,
Adam
Co-Owner
Fortunato Chocolate
www.fortunatochocolate.com
Phone: 425-657-6637
Email: adam@fortunatochocolate.com