Sensory App Enhancement for Cacao of Excellence

The Cacao of Excellence Lab App is being developed as a centralized digital solution to transform how cacao quality laboratories manage and track data associated with cacao samples, laboratory processes, inventories, and analytical tools. This initiative stems from the need to replace the current fragmented system of paper forms, Excel spreadsheets, and disconnected digital tools with a fully integrated, scalable platform. 

To design and build a customized, all-in-one application that allows laboratory staff to:

Track cacao samples from intake to final product.

Monitor and manage inventory of lab products, materials, and ingredients.

Standardize data capture across all processes for improved traceability, accuracy, and scalability.

Cacao samples arrive at the lab in the form of raw beans and undergo various processing stages — such as roasting, grinding into cacao mass, and chocolate production. Each stage involves capturing important measurements and metadata (e.g., weights, dates, test results). A single sample can simultaneously exist in multiple product forms (e.g., 1 kg as beans, 1 kg as cacao mass, 1.5 kg as chocolate), requiring sophisticated tracking logic.

In parallel, the lab consumes and manages:

Ingredients (e.g., sugar, cacao butter)

Lab materials (e.g., plastic jars, cleaning supplies)

Digital tools (e.g., milling time predictors, recipe calculators)

Currently, all this data is manually collected and stored across disconnected Excel files, making it error-prone, time-consuming, and difficult to scale or audit.

The app provides:

Enable structured input of key data at every processing stage

Maintain historical and real-time traceability of each cacao batch

Link derived products (mass, chocolate) to original bean batches

Automatically update product, ingredient, and material inventories based on process data

Example: Making chocolate from cacao mass should reduce cacao mass and ingredients while increasing chocolate stock

Easily query product inventories by sample, form, location (e.g., cold room)

Visual alerts for low stock of materials and ingredients

Streamlined overview of what’s in use, in stock, or in transformation