Development and evaluation of NMR methods for the determination of physico-chemical properties of solid cocoa-related products

• Grant number: 25/10426-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Chemistry - Analytical Chemistry
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Alberto Colnago
• Grantee: Thais Juliana Tobias
• Host Institution: Embrapa Instrumentação Agropecuária. Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (EMBRAPA). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 25/00509-8 - DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATIONS OF NMR AND INFRARED SPECTROSCOPIES IN THE ANALYSIS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS, AP.R

Abstract

Chocolate and other cocoa-related products constitute a multi-billion-dollar industry. The raw material for these products, cocoa beans, has been experiencing a substantial increase in global markets prices in the last few years. Such an increase is attributed to, for example, environmental factors such as climate change affecting cocoa-growing regions and may lead to increase instances of fraud and adulteration in cocoa-related products. Consequently, this leads to an increase in the demand for rapid authentication methods and quality control. This doctoral research proposal aims to develop and implement Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) methods, for solid samples, using both low-field and high-field NMR systems, which can be applied to the quality control and certification within the cocoa supply chain products. Low-field NMR technique is already largely used in the cocoa industry for the determination of Solid Fat Content (SFC), but this research aims to expand its applications through the development of solid echo pulse sequences, for example. High-field, solid-state NMR (SS-NMR) has also been used to, specially, characterize the crystalline structures of cocoa butter. Therefore, numerous SS-NMR methods can be further developed to study molecular dynamics studies and crystalline structures, not only for cocoa butter but also for chocolate samples and various other cocoa-related products.