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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 7TH JUNE, 2015
It ismid-morning on campus
and Professor Pathmanathan
Umaharan, Head of the Cocoa Research Centre (CRC), is
making his way across to the engineering labs. He is going
to see about a machine. Seems a mundane enough trip, a
ten-minute walk through the campus grounds from the
Agriculture Faculty to Engineering; but this is only one stop
in an enormously important journey, years in the planning
and years still from its destination.
The machine, a final-year project of mechanical
engineering student Sayeed Khan, automates the process of
splitting cocoa pods and extracting the seeds. It’s a crucial
step in the cocoa cultivation process and one that has
remained little changed over its history.
“In cocoa production, none of the procedures have
beenmechanised,” Prof Umaharan says. “Everything is done
manually in a traditional way.”
And for the reinvigoration of an industry that has
been on the decline for many decades, in part because of
a dwindling labour pool, that must change. The CRC sees
innovation-driven mechanisation as a potential catalyst
for this change – and a much wider and more ambitious
transformation. Partnering with the Department of
Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (MME), they
are working towards creating a robust cocoa sector, from
cocoa production to chocolate manufacturing, powered
by regionally developed and constructed equipment and
machinery.
The goal is audacious, but perhaps even more exciting
is the strategy being used to achieve their objective.
Faculties are coming together and fostering an innovative
culture within the university, with the purpose of finding
solutions to some of the region’s challenges in the areas of
food production, economic diversification and value-added
exports.
“The whole nation (Trinidad and Tobago) has been
crying for diversification away from oil and gas,” says
Rodney Harnarine, Development Engineer in MME. “This
is one area where there is a real opportunity. If we can
move and grow this opportunity in agriculture and agro-
processing we are creating jobs. It is a win-win situation
for us.”
Harnarine, like some of his colleagues within the
Faculty of Engineering, has been an unyielding advocate
for applied innovation, particularly in the area of food
production. He is also a major facilitator of the growing
culture of innovation within MME (see A Secret Garden of
Ideas, UWI Today, April 2015
/
archive/april_2015/article11.asp).
Innovation, food production, economic diversification
– there is almost no way to over-emphasize how important
these three are to the long-termwellbeing of the Caribbean,
or to the planners with responsibility for the region’s future.
Whether the project succeeds or not, this remarkable
example of inter-faculty collaboration is an outstanding
model for how UWI can interact both with itself and the
societies it was created to serve.
Potential in a pod
“Three years ago Prof Umaharan approached us to
build equipment for the cocoa industry because they had
problems with labour,” says Harnarine over the din of
machinery at the Strength of Materials Laboratory of MME.
The department was hosting an informal exhibition
of student projects – an array of innovative pieces ranging
from advances in agro-processing, to bamboo work, to
glass testing and even medical care. Among them were two
projects directly related to the work of the CRC – a conche (a
device used in the making of chocolate) designed by student
Javed Mustapha, and the cocoa pod splitter.
Umaharan explains his interest in the machines:
“Mechanisation, we think, is a way to make agriculture
much easier and sexier than how it is at the moment.
That is why I am working very closely with mechanical
engineering. We want to introduce more mechanisation in
terms of pruning, harvesting, cracking the pods, transferring
the pods from the field to the fermentation area, and
even fermenters. We use mechanical fermenters that can
accelerate the rate of fermentation and improve its quality.”
MME has already developed a prototype automated
fermenter for CRC under the supervision of Dr Graham
King. The centre is also working with Dr Saheeda Mujaffar
in the Department of Chemical Engineering to develop an
artificial drying method for cocoa.
A Caribbean Cocoa Model
Home to the high quality Trinitario variant of cocoa
bean, investment in cocoa as a primary product makes
sense in Trinidad and Tobago. But even though increasing
agricultural production is crucial for the development of a
sector that can make a significant impact on GDP, the real
gold is in cocoa as a source of manufactured products.
“If you sell cocoa at the current price of TT$20 per kg,
somebody takes that and manufactures chocolate and that
product is then multiplied by 200%. So that person benefits
from our labour, whereas if we could add the value here we
would benefit,” explains Harnarine. “This is where we need
to go – add value to our crops.”
Trinidad and Tobago has already developed an
enormously successful value-addition model in its energy
sector. It was a pioneer in using its natural gas as the
foundation of an extensive and highly profitable value chain
that extended from discovery and production, through
refining and downstream manufacturing. Along the way,
the value of its natural resources has multiplied, a host of
new industries have sprung up and many more people have
found employment in a well-articulated energy sector.
Strategic thinkers like Umaharan and Harnarine want
the same for cocoa. And once again, innovation can help.
“The CRC has a small chocolate factory that produces
chocolate and trains persons from the sector in chocolate
making,” says Umaharan. “Over the last two years we have
trained over 100 persons but when they needmachinery and
they see the great expense to buy and import the machinery
themselves, they have not been able to get into chocolate
making.”
He adds, “that is where this linkage (with MME)
becomes so important. We can use the linkage to make
the equipment here cost effectively and really jumpstart a
chocolate industry instead of exporting cocoa as a primary
product.”
The conche on display at the MME exhibition is one
example of a locally developedmachine for the manufacture
of chocolate. In the chocolate making process, the conche
is the seventh step (see “Chocolate in Stages”) – heating,
aerating and kneading the chocolate as well as calibrating
the flavouring system. However, many local manufacturers
do not have access to a conche and are forced to improvise.
“Currently local chocolate makers improvise with a
melangeur to perform the functionality of the conche,” says
INNOVATION
On May 15, the Faculty of Engineering hosted an exhibition of
student projects at an Innovation in Engineering event. There were
demonstrations of equipment in solar energy, medicare, CNC
machining and 3D printing manufacturing, cocoa and chocolate
production machines, and agro-processing machines (sweet potato,
plantain, cassava, chataigne and coconuts). On this page is a cocoa
pod splitter, and on the facing page, a chataigne peeler.
UWI
and the
Chocolate Factory
B y J o e l H e n r y
