Raw chocolate
Chocolate made without roasting, or with minimal heat. An unregulated claim, and one the fermentation step complicates considerably.
What it is
Raw chocolate is marketed as having been produced without heating above a stated temperature — usually somewhere between 42 and 48°C. There is no regulated definition, no agreed threshold and no audit.
The complication is upstream. Cacao beans are fermented at origin in heaps and boxes that routinely reach around 50°C, and are then sun-dried. Beans described as raw have therefore generally been through a process well above the temperatures the term implies, before anyone in a factory made a decision about roasting.
What is true is that unroasted cacao tastes different — more acidic, more astringent, less recognisably chocolatey, because roasting is what converts the fermentation's precursors into chocolate aroma. Whether that is better is a preference. Whether it is nutritionally superior is a claim ChocolateHQ does not make.
- Category kind
- A composition — this describes what is in the product
- Legal status
- A marketing term with no legal definition and no audit behind it
- Typical range on shelves
- 60–100%
- Also called
- unroasted chocolate, cold-processed chocolate
- Flavour families
- acidic, bitter, fruity
- Texture
- grainy, brittle
What the percentage means here
Total cacao-derived mass, as on any dark chocolate.
Commonly misunderstood
That 'raw' means the cacao was never heated. Fermentation heaps reach around 50°C and sun drying adds more, both of them before the maker sees the beans.
Related
Flavours it tends toward
Commonly confused with
- Nama chocolate'Nama' means fresh and refers to the cream. It is read as 'raw' in the sense of unroasted, which describes a completely different and unrelated category.
Compared in
- Raw chocolate vs conventional dark chocolateSet against Conventional dark chocolate, with the practical consequence of each difference.
Defined by
- FermentationThe step where chocolate flavour is created rather than developed. Skip it and no amount of roasting will produce chocolate.
Health topics covering this
- Cocoa products are not interchangeableThe clearest case of a health claim resting on processing rather than composition. The topic explains why 'less processed' does not straightforwardly mean more of the compounds studied, and why fermentation and roasting are not merely destructive steps.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)