The Cacao Industry Involves Multiple Procedures of Growing Cacao Free Essay Example

The cacao industry involves multiple procedures of growing cacao and preparing the beans for use. This means that it needs more convenient and faster operation to ease and boost the production of cacao in our country. Through the process, local farmers tend to go with the native way of processing and preparing cacao to be sold to the market. Such operations include drying the cacao beans, roasting the dried seeds, winnowing, and then grinding the nibs to turn them into cocoa powder [1,2].

Roasting dried cacao seeds is essential to the winnowing as it eases up the separation of cacao shell from the nibs. However, for local farmers, the procedure becomes tedious, especially when it comes to handling high volume. The request for cacao has been increasing continuously every year that the DOA (Department of Agriculture) estimated the demand globally for up to 4.7 to 5 million MT (metric tons) for the next year (2020). In the country alone, the Philippines, the consumption outweighs the supply by 50,000 Metric Tons versus 10,000 Metric tons and this projected deficit challenges local and national government in increasing the production by 40 percent increase as the year 2020 closes [4].

Farmers, apart from other current players of the chocolate industry, sees great and increasing opportunity as global demand grows and all and new cocoa-based value products are presented over the market needs. [5] Providing modern appliance should be able to aid small-time farmers, engaged in the cacao industry, to be productive and efficient.

Preceding studies only uses one process either by winnowing or roasting.

The most similar was designed by B. O. Akinnuli, wherein the design concept from British Journal includes a sieve and blower, for winnowing. The process generally separates the shells from the nibs by blowing the shells and using vibration to sort the beans into different sizes using meshed wire [6]. Regarding the challenges of separation, a journal from Agricultural Engineering Research, a comparison of stream trajectory is considered [7]. Some data are gathered by similar designs in England for the Cadbury Brothers Cocoa Plantation located in Cameroon. [8,9]. A machine called Zinke were used for crushing the husk into pieces by several teeth although there are some small parts of husks mixed with the nibs. [10]

Some researchers state that the roasted cacao and coffee seeds are similar but the cacao are more brittle than the coffee, the usual temperature in cacao is lower compared to coffee, as coffee beans need to be subjected to heat at higher temperature [3]. In terms of winnowing, the grilled cacao seeds are easy to winnow while roasting it inside a cylindrical drum, as this helps the beans to be pre-cracked due to its continuous rotation along with its blades inside which makes the removing of shells easier.

The point of doing this research is to be able to do a simultaneous process of roasting and winnowing, which lessen the actual time of processing cacao seeds compared to manual operation. Doing the roasting consumes 25 to 30 minutes, which spends more time. To save time and effort, adding the winnowing procedure right after grilling the seeds was conceptualized as this operation does not only reduces the time but also allows working at larger volume to increase the productivity.

The study aims to; (1) to design a winnower with roaster for cacao beans, (2) to fabricate the designed winnower with the roaster, and (3) to perform a function test of the machine.

Most of the key players in the cacao industry here in Mindanao are composed of smallholder farmers supplying beans to manufacturers and processors [11]. The fabrication of the designed mechanism should be able to aid our local farmers, based in Mindanao, engaged in the cacao industry. The machinery would then be able to increase farmers’ efficiency and production rate as such making their task less tedious. As considered to be a modern machine that can be utilized by our local farmers to become efficient and productive on their trades in theindustry, it would make them competitive and would increase profit in the cacao industry. This, in turn, would also be beneficial to the agricultural trade sector.

The scope area of this research applies to local farmers in Region XI engaged in the cocoa industry. Local farmers are termed farmers who go with the native process (roasting and winnowing manually) and don’t use any types of

machinery. Source of cacao coming from region XI would be the basis as its conditions for fabricating the design, e.g., size of bean, quality, hybrid, etc. The designed mechanism should hold a capacity of not more than 5 kilograms, referencing the baseline of 2-3 kilograms of cacao beans which farmers can work on when roasting.

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