What contaminants other than heavy metals are found in cocoa?

Heavy metals are the contaminant family the public knows about, and they are not the only one. Four others are recognised in cocoa and each has a traceable cause in the chain the catalogue already describes.

MYCOTOXINS, principally ochratoxin A, are produced by moulds that grow when beans are dried too slowly, rewetted by rain, or stored damp. Ochratoxin A is regulated in the European Union under the consolidated contaminants regulation, which sets maximum levels for cocoa products. The pathway is the same one the drying guide describes as a flavour defect: what shows up in the cup as musty shows up in a laboratory as a mycotoxin, and the prevention is identical — dry properly, store dry.

POLYCYCLIC AROMATIC HYDROCARBONS arrive from combustion. Where beans are dried over a fire, or in an artificial dryer whose combustion gases contact them rather than being kept separate, smoke compounds are absorbed along with the smoke taint. PAHs are regulated in the same instrument.

MINERAL OIL HYDROCARBONS — reported as MOSH and MOAH — have caused repeated recalls across food categories including cocoa. The documented routes are batching oil on jute sacks, lubricants in processing machinery, and printing inks in packaging. This is a packaging-and-handling contaminant rather than an agricultural one.

ACRYLAMIDE forms from asparagine and reducing sugars during high-temperature roasting, in cocoa as in coffee, bread and potatoes. It is monitored across roasted foods.

It does not show that chocolate is unsafe, and nothing here should be read that way. These are regulated contaminant classes present at monitored levels in a food eaten in small quantities; the existence of a maximum level is evidence that a limit was thought worth setting, not that ordinary consumption exceeds it.

It does not give figures. Maximum levels are set per product category, are periodically revised, and differ between jurisdictions — the catalogue names the regulation and directs a reader to it rather than reproducing numbers that will be wrong within a few years.

It does not establish a health outcome at dietary intake from chocolate. The toxicology of each compound is established at doses these products do not deliver, and no claim of harm from ordinary consumption is made here.

And it does not show that any one product is affected. Contamination is batch-specific and testing is a supply-chain function; nothing on a wrapper reports it.

The regulatory limits are matters of published law and are not in dispute. The occurrence data — how often, at what levels, from which origins — comes from surveillance studies of varying coverage, and the picture differs by contaminant and by market. The formation pathways are well characterised chemistry. Placed at `plausible_mechanism` because the record describes mechanisms and a regulatory regime rather than asserting an effect at dietary intake, which is a claim it deliberately does not make.