Cocoa butter equivalent

The original vegetable fat made by Unilever and the many others that are now on the market are known as cocoa butter equivalents, as they are like cocoa butter and can be added in any proportion without causing a significant softening or hardening effect.

To ensure complete compatibility (i.e solid phase miscibility) with cocoa butter, a fat must have not only a similar melting profile but also a similar molecular size and polymorphism.

The best way to achieve this is to mimic the molecular composition. Thus, cocoa butter equivalents are designed to have triacylglycerol compositions as close to cocoa butter as possible.

They are made from fats, hard fraction (stearins) of fats, or blends of such fats that have high levels of Sat-O-Sat triacylglycerols. There are many sources of such triacylglycerols but the most common by far is palm oil.

Cocoa butter equivalent can be used in dark and milk chocolate in various proportions, with little influence in the physical properties of the fat blended when based on a normal cocoa butter; it can be used by chocolate producers with no change in process conditions.

Production of a cocoa butter equivalent would involve the purification and fractionation of a series of different naturally occurring fats to obtain the proper proportion of the desired triglycerides having the desired structure, at the appropriate levels.

These equivalents are commercially viable only when the price of cocoa bitter is high enough to justify their high costs.
Cocoa butter equivalent