What processing takes out

Almost everything studied about cacao and the body traces back to one family of compounds: flavanols, and epicatechin above all. Not cacao in the abstract. The dose of flavanols.

Alkalizing is where they go

Most cocoa powder on a shelf has been alkalized, a process also called Dutching, which softens colour and flavour. It also strips out the flavanols. Measured against natural cocoa, alkalizing cuts epicatechin by up to around 98%. One study weighed it directly: 34.6 milligrams of total flavanols per gram in natural cocoa against 3.9 in heavily alkalized cocoa, roughly a 90% loss.

We do not alkalize. That is the whole claim, and it is a claim about the ingredient rather than about your health.

What the flavanols are actually good for

The European Food Safety Authority reviewed the evidence and authorised exactly one wording: cocoa flavanols help maintain endothelium-dependent vasodilation, which contributes to normal blood flow. In plainer language, they help blood vessels stay flexible. The authorised dose is 200 milligrams of cocoa flavanols a day.

We have not had our own cacao tested for flavanol content, so we are not going to tell you that a cup delivers that dose. What we can tell you is which step would have destroyed it, and that we skip that step.

The small numbers, said honestly

Blood pressure comes up in every conversation. A Cochrane review across 35 trials found that flavanol-rich cocoa lowered it by about 2 mmHg. The effect was concentrated in people who already run high, around 4 mmHg, and was not statistically significant in people with normal blood pressure. That is a real result and a small one, and inflating it would be the easiest lie in this industry.

What we are not going to claim

• Memory and focus. The two largest trials found nothing. A three-year study of 3,562 people missed its primary memory endpoint outright.
• Gut health. A trial of 900 milligrams a day for eight days found no clear prebiotic effect.
• Mood. There is a popular story about bliss molecules in cacao. Strong human trials do not support it, and we are not going to medicalise a warm drink.

What is in the cup that should not be

Cacao trees pull minerals out of the soil, the good and the bad alike, so heavy metals vary enormously from farm to farm. Every harvest of ours is tested. Arsenic, mercury and lead come back not detectable. Cadmium, the most tightly regulated of them worldwide, sits at 0.15 milligrams per kilo, comfortably inside international limits.

None of this makes cacao a medicine. It makes it a food worth being careful about, which is a smaller claim and a truer one.