Sweet pulp and refreshing juice most people never know about
When we think about cacao, we think about chocolate.
Chocolate bars. Cocoa powder. Cacao nibs. Maybe cocoa butter.
Almost all of those come from the seed.
I had never really stopped to think about the rest of the fruit.
That changed on a cacao farm in Ecuador.
We learned how to recognize which cacao pods were ripe enough to pick, chose our own, and opened them. Inside were rows of seeds, each surrounded by soft white pulp.
And that was the first surprise.
The pulp is edible.
Not only edible. Delicious.
We tasted pulp from different varieties of cacao, and they tasted different from one another—just like different varieties of apples do.
The pulp was mostly sweet, a little tangy, and reminded me a lot of lychee.
Fresh tropical fruit. Nothing chocolatey about it.
Then came the juice
Eating the pulp straight from the pod gave us little tastes at a time.
Drinking the juice was a completely different experience.
It was warm in Ecuador, and we were served chilled cacao fruit juice. It was fruity, naturally sweet, lightly tart and incredibly refreshing.
I loved it.
In fact, the juice may have been my favorite part of the whole cacao experience.
Unfortunately, cacao pulp and juice are highly perishable. That makes them difficult to store, transport and sell far from where cacao is grown.
Cacao “honey” — but not the honey you have in mind
One way some producers preserve the juice is by cooking it down into a syrup sometimes called cacao honey.
Despite the name, it doesn’t taste like honey at all.
It’s closer to a fruity, tangy syrup.
There wasn’t much available at the farm. I ended up buying a few bottles that were so freshly prepared they didn’t even have labels yet.
I had wanted to bring the fresh juice home so friends and family could taste it, but it simply wouldn’t keep long enough. So the cacao honey became the next best thing.
Still, what I really wanted was the juice.
So I went looking for it
Back in the United States, I started searching.
I found out that Trader Joe’s had carried cacao fruit juice, so naturally I went looking for it.
No luck.
The stores around me didn’t have it.
That was disappointing. I wanted to taste it again, and I wanted other people to understand why I had liked it so much.
Then, much later, I spotted shelf-stable cacao fruit drinks at Costco.
I was pleasantly surprised—and excited.
Something I had thought of as a local, highly perishable part of my Ecuador experience was suddenly available in the United States.
Of course I bought it.
Later, during one of my occasional trips to Whole Foods, I came across cacao fruit gummies.
At that point, this became more interesting to me than simply finding a drink I liked.
Wait—we were letting this go to waste?
Most of that juice traditionally goes unused.
And it adds up.
The fresh cacao needed for about one pound of 70% chocolate can release roughly 6–7 ounces of recoverable cacao juice—about one small juice serving.
It was fruity, fragrant and refreshing—the kind of thing we routinely pay for as juice.
In other forms, it can become syrup, gummies and other familiar foods. This isn’t some strange by-product being forced into use.
That’s where upcycling gets interesting
This is the part that appeals to both sides of me.
As a dietitian, I see food that was edible all along.
As someone who cares about sustainability, I see a chance to get more useful food from a crop we are already growing.
Finding more uses for cacao pulp and juice—whether as beverages, syrups, gummies or other foods—is a straightforward form of upcycling.
And it doesn’t take much convincing to drink juice or eat a gummy.
The best upcycling ideas may be the ones that don’t feel like a compromise.
For the curious: the numbers behind the juice
Fresh cacao pulp has a long history of human use. Archaeological evidence from Honduras suggests some of the earliest cacao beverages may have been made by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds, before seed-based chocolate drinks became dominant.
The pulp itself is mostly water and naturally contains sugars and organic acids, along with vitamins, minerals and other plant compounds. Its composition varies with cacao variety, ripeness and growing conditions.
The 6–7 ounce estimate comes from cacao-processing mass-balance data. In one study, 1,000 kg of fresh cacao fruit produced about 43 kg of recoverable cacao juice and about 88 kg of fermented, dried beans. Dried beans also lose some weight as shell before the nib becomes chocolate. Using those yields as a rough guide, the cacao ingredients needed for one pound of 70% chocolate are associated with roughly 6–7 ounces of recoverable juice. The exact amount varies with variety, processing and chocolate formulation, so this is an estimate rather than a universal conversion.
In cacao-processing literature, that liquid may be called mucilage exudate or cacao sweatings. It is released as the pulp breaks down around the beans during fermentation. Traditionally, much of it has drained away rather than being collected for food use—which is exactly why newer juice, syrup and gummy products are interesting from an upcycling perspective.
I have no affiliation with any of the companies or retailers mentioned here.
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