Cocoa powder

One US cup of cocoa powder weighs 86 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 1.16 cups.

Also called unsweetened cocoa powder, natural cocoa powder, Dutch-processed cocoa, Dutched cocoa.

USDA and King Arthur agree within 2.4%, well inside the 10% milled tolerance. Cocoa powder is a defatted grind of roasted cacao solids, with roughly 10 to 24% cocoa butter remaining and 3 to 5% water; the milled character puts it in the same category as powdered sugar, though cocoa contains no starch anti-caking agent and its particles are finer. USDA FDC 169593 publishes a cup at 86 g (0.3635 g/ml) and a tablespoon at 5.4 g (0.3652 g/ml), a spread of 0.47%.

These are one density rounded twice, not two measurements. King Arthur's Ingredient Weight Chart lists cocoa (unsweetened) at 42 g per half cup, implying 84 g per cup or 0.3550 g/ml. King Arthur's Recipe Success Guide separately states their measuring method for dry ingredients as spoon-and-sweep, though the Ingredient Weight Chart does not attach a method to the cocoa figure itself, so the method attribution is weaker than for flour where King Arthur cited weight and method on the same page.

Dutch-processed and natural cocoa powder are treated as one entry here because they weigh the same. USDA publishes Dutch-processed unsweetened cocoa at FDC 169594 with a cup portion of 86 g, matching the natural entry; alkalisation changes flavour, colour and pH, and shifts the potassium and calcium content, but does not measurably change particle density. America's Test Kitchen's cocoa taste test recommends Dutch-processed for baking on the basis of fat content and starch behaviour, but this is a flavour and cookery finding rather than a density one.

Method variation exists in principle. America's Test Kitchen's Hot Cocoa recipe explicitly measures cocoa by dip-and-sweep, which suggests some baking authorities treat cocoa as a scoop-and-level ingredient rather than a spooned one. USDA's portion data does not distinguish the two, and King Arthur's chart implicitly uses their default spooned technique.

If the two methods produced meaningfully different densities the entry would split into states as flour does, but the observed 2.4% gap between USDA's likely-scooped figure and King Arthur's stated-spoon-and-sweep figure sits well inside category tolerance. This may reflect that cocoa's fineness makes bridging less pronounced than in flour, since a fine powder settles more predictably than one with larger, irregular particles. Hershey's own container labels give a tablespoon at 5 g, implying 80 g per cup on the customary volume.

That figure is not used here. Nutrition-label tablespoons round to the nearest whole gram on a 14.8 ml spoon, giving a rounding band of roughly 20%, which is wider than the difference the source would resolve. The same convention appears on other retail cocoa containers and is a labelling standard rather than an independent measurement.

No standards body publishes a bulk density for cocoa powder. Codex Alimentarius standards for cocoa products cover composition and grading rather than physical density, so the standards route that resolves olive oil and canola oil is not available here. Two sources only, so this entry does not meet rule 2 and is held at medium confidence until an independent third is found.