Ivorian cocoa rejections jump on high acidity levels

Excessive acidity in cocoa beans arriving at ports in top grower Ivory Coast has led to the rejection of around one third of deliveries in recent weeks, exporters said on Friday. High rejection rates was likely to have led to the double counting of trucks entering export facilities, they said, potentially inflating arrivals' estimates in recent weeks.
"We've been forced to sharply reduce our purchases due to FFA (free fatty acid) levels way above those accepted. We've rejected one in three trucks since February 1, and yesterday it was one of every two trucks," one exporter told Reuters. Two other Ivory Coast-based exporters said they have had to turn away one quarter to one third of bean deliveries from plantations over the past two weeks.
There is debate within the industry over what causes high FFA levels, which erode the quality of cocoa butter, the ingredient that gives chocolate its melt-in-the-mouth texture. Dry weather, exposure to black pod disease, and whether beans are broken are all believed to have an effect on FFAs. Stored beans also tend to have higher FFA levels.
Ivory Coast is in its mid-November to March dry season, which this year has been marked by very little rainfall, high temperatures and unusually harsh Harmattan desert winds. The European Union has set a ceiling for FFAs in cocoa beans of 1.75 percent oleic acid equivalent. However, trucks arriving at the ports of Abidjan and San Pedro contained beans with levels up to 4 percent.
"It's impossible to sell these kinds of beans so we reject whole deliveries," said another exporter. According to exporters' estimates published by Reuters earlier this week, Ivorian cocoa arrivals reached around 1,141,000 tonnes by February 8, outpacing last year's record crop for the first time since the start of the season on October 1. However, some exporters now believe estimates showing robust arrivals recently may have been wrong.
"I think there's been a lot of double counting these last two weeks due to the high number of trucks that were rejected due to bean quality," the commercial director of an Abidjan-based exporter. Exporters calculate their estimates by counting the number of trucks arriving at their facilities as well as those of their competitors. "These trucks drove around looking to unload at different operators and that surely artificially inflated the estimated volumes the past two weeks," an exporter in San Pedro said.