Certificate course in Cacao Flavor Evaluation, 7 Dec 2026
This course is brought to you by the International Institute of Cacao and Chocolate Tasting (IICCT) and the Indian Cacao and Craft Chocolate Festival.
📋 Course at a glance
| 📅 Dates | 7–10 December 2026 (4 days) |
| 🕙 Time | 10:00 am – 6:00 pm |
| 📍 Location | Bangalore, India |
| 💰 Full price | €995 |
| 🗣️ Language | English (course, materials and exam) |
About the course
Cacao Flavor Evaluation is a comprehensive sensory and technical course that will give you a deeper understanding of flavor in fine cacao and how the flavor potential of cacao can be unlocked in finished chocolate.
The course follows the IICCT principle that we can measure the quality of a chocolate by how much you enjoy its flavor. In Cacao Flavor Evaluation we take the same approach with cacao: good tasting cacao can make great chocolate; defective, bad cacao that you don’t want to eat, will not make good chocolate.
The Cacao Flavor Evaluation course will help you develop the sensory skills needed to assess cacao quality through its flavor, the transformation of cacao flavor into finished chocolate, and how cacao flavor relates to technical methods of evaluating cacao.
Sensory
Cacao Flavor Evaluation includes extensive tasting and evaluation of cacao, including:
- Samples of recognised high-quality cacao from a range of origins
- Sampling different preparation protocols: dried cacao, nibs, sweetened liquor and lab chocolate
- Roasting sets from dried beans to light roasting and through to extreme high roasts
- Exploring defects and problems through physical examples
- Evaluating cacao using the IICCT system, focusing on good flavor and defects
- Workthroughs from dried cacao to finished chocolate, including bean-by-bean tasting of different cacao origins to understand where the flavor comes from. Do all the beans taste the same, or is your cacao a mix of genetics?
Technical
The sensory training is backed up with knowledge sessions focusing on:
- Review of technical approaches to cacao evaluation and alternative approaches
- Market sectors, facts and figures, and fine flavor definitions
- Realities of cacao farming and fermentation, the good and the bad
- Cacao genetics, varieties and reproduction — what’s really happening at farm level?
- How cacao moved around the world and how this helps us learn about flavor
The evaluations made during the course are carried out using the Institute’s electronic sensory evaluation method, which is based on an understanding of cacao flavour and quality that can be applied with any sample preparation protocol, including dried cacao, cacao liquor, and sample or retail chocolate.
Our approach recognises that cacao is a crop grown to produce foods giving us hedonistic pleasure and an enjoyable eating experience. Technical industry knowledge can be useful for basic screening and quality control, but good chocolate needs a flavor profile that’s complex, distinctive and balanced, and this requires an understanding of flavor, from cacao to bar. If you want to understand great flavor in chocolate and where it comes from, this is the course for you.
What's included
- Training the senses to appreciate cacao flavour
- Sensory exploration, practice and the brain science of cacao tasting
- What is fine cacao and how we define it
- Tasting of example cacaos and sample protocols
- Origins and varieties of cacao and the history of cacao introductions
- Cacao production, quality and problems
- How cacao is processed and how this affects flavor
- Tasting practice and profiling with our online system
- Understanding and tasting flaws and defects in cacao
- Cacao farming, economics and trading
- Take-away study guides
- Certificate for exam passes
Who should take this course?
The course will help your development and flavour understanding if you are:
- An established chocolate maker
- A start-up chocolate maker
- A chocolate taster
- A cacao trader or commercial grower
- A cooperative technician
- An NGO staff member
- Anyone interested in cacao flavor and quality
- Anyone wanting to develop sensory skills in a new area or learn more about cacao
There are no previous entry requirements for this course. An understanding of fine chocolate is recommended, which can be achieved through our Certificate in Chocolate Tasting courses. Familiarity with the online IICCT Flavor Profiling system is also an advantage, but not essential, as this can be gained during the course.
Please note that there will be some repetition of Level 1 & 2 Chocolate Tasting material explaining the IICCT sensory approach and profiling system. For the online version of the course, Chocolate Tasting students may skip the relevant webinars, sections or lectures if they have previously covered this material.
Assessment & exam details
Certificates will be awarded to candidates who pass a multiple-choice exam and the tasting assessments.
- Exams are in English; translation tools are not permitted.
- Retaking a failed exam costs €100, with no discount for retakes. Online retakes are available with a shipping surcharge.
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