Cacao vs Cocoa

Many of your favorite Chocolate drinks and Chocolate products, home-prepared or self-prepared, use the widely and mass-produced Cocoa powder in lieu of Cacao powder. This choice, along with preservation techniques, removes many of the health benefits of chocolate, in favor of mass production and cheap accessibility. At ChocoVivo, with this knowledge, we produce all of our Chocolate products using Cacao and minimally fermented Cocoa in order to retain as many health benefits as possible of the Cacao beans in our savory chocolate. At ChocoVivo cacao is our world. Our jobs revolve around it. Because we have a vertically integrated supply chain, we understand the process of taking raw cacao and making it into various forms that you see in the store.  

To understand why ChocoVivo’s cacao powder is better for you than traditional cocoa powder, we need to understand the process of how the cocoa powder is made and how that process is different from cacao powder. Cocoa powder you find in most grocery stores is made by roasting cacao beans at a high temperature and then pressing the fat out of the cacao.  These high temperatures virtually strip the cacao beans of all their nutritional value and enzymes that make cacao a superfood. Cacao powder, by contrast, is made with the fat fully intact while just breaking it down to powder form using machinery like a blender. There is no need to separate out the fat, as that’s what gives cacao powder it’s richness and uniqueness.  You can see the difference of these powders in their color flavor, with cocoa powder being a light brown and mild flavor and cacao powder is a richer, darker brown, more true to the original color of the cacao bean and has a full, thick, savory taste.

Here at ChocoVivo, we have many uses for cacao powder, such as our hot chocolates, chocolate pastries, bitters, and cacao milks. All of these items you can easily make at home too with our cacao powder! At home as well, any recipe that calls for ‘dark chocolate’ if you use cacao powder, you will be delighted by the results. 

Find yourself in love with the taste of cocoa powder still? We have good news for you, ChocoVivo has cocoa powder too, we make it by cold pressing the cacao rather than subjecting it to high temperatures, so the end result is a cocoa powder that is still packed with nutrients.

Either way you decide to go, cacao powder or cocoa powder, choose the product that will give you the better taste and is packed with nutrients. Here at ChocoVivo, we can guarantee the highest quality cacao and cocoa powder that will revolutionize the way you consume chocolate.