Cocoa powder in grams, and the charts that will not agree
Cocoa powder weighs 86 grams to the US cup by the USDA. Look elsewhere and you will meet 80, 100 and even 120 for that same cup. Cocoa is the lightest thing in this pantry, so the same gram of disagreement takes a bigger bite out of it than it would out of flour.
What a cup of cocoa weighs, and the half cup we will not double
The USDA is the only authority that prints a whole cup of unsweetened cocoa, at 86 g. King Arthur stops at a half cup of 42 g. Doubling that gives 84 against the USDA's measured 86, and the gap is small enough to tempt you. We still refuse it: a published figure is a measurement, not a formula, and the Japanese tables show what scaling one does to a powder. The methodology page works that case through.
Cocoa conversions in full
Grams and ounces from the spoon up. A single cup of cocoa in grams is the figure most recipes ask for, and the fractions below come off the same USDA measurement. Going the other way, 100 grams of cocoa in cups overflows past one.
| Unsweetened cocoa | Grams | Ounces |
|---|---|---|
| 1 tablespoon | 5.4 g | 0.19 oz |
| 1/4 cup | 21.5 g | 0.76 oz |
| 1/3 cup | 28.7 g | 1 oz |
| 1/2 cup | 43 g | 1.5 oz |
| 3/4 cup | 64.5 g | 2.3 oz |
| 1 cup | 86 g | 3 oz |
| 2 cups | 172 g | 6.1 oz |
Density used: 0.36 g per ml, the lightest on this site.
The metric charts argue over a fifth of the cup
Australian Women's Weekly and Sanitarium both weigh a metric cup of cocoa at 100 g. Chelsea, across the Tasman, reads 80. That 20 gram argument sits on a cup of about 100 grams, so a fifth of the ingredient depends on whose chart you opened. The same 20 grams would be a rounding footnote on a cup of flour; on cocoa it is a fifth of what the recipe asked for.
| Cup | Unsweetened cocoa |
|---|---|
| US customary | 86 g |
| Metric (250 ml) | 80 to 100 g |
| Japanese (200 ml) | 80 to 90 g |
Natural or Dutch-process: the split no chart makes
A recipe that calls for Dutch-process cocoa means a different product from one that calls for natural, and bakers treat them as separate ingredients. No chart we hold treats them that way. King Arthur weighs one cocoa. The USDA weighs one cocoa. Neither says which process it measured, so nobody can tell you whether the two land differently on a scale. We publish the one number that exists and flag the gap rather than let a single figure imply a question was settled.
Two Japanese tables, two cocoas
Benricho weighs a 200 millilitre cup of cocoa at 90 g and Kyoritsu at 80. The names differ: Benricho lists pure cocoa, Kyoritsu lists cocoa powder. Those may be two products rather than one product measured twice, which would explain a 10 gram gap that neither table calls an error. We keep both figures with their names attached, since a number without the product it belongs to is the way charts go wrong.
Questions about cocoa weight
- How many grams is a cup of cocoa powder?
- 86 g of unsweetened cocoa, from the USDA, the only authority that publishes a whole cup. Charts elsewhere print anything from 80 to 120 for the same cup, which is why we name our source instead of averaging them.
- How much does a tablespoon of cocoa weigh?
- 5.4 g, from the USDA. Sixteen of those come to 86.4 g, within half a gram of the same authority's 86 g cup, so on cocoa the spoon and the cup line up rather than drifting apart.
- Does Dutch-process cocoa weigh the same as natural cocoa?
- Nobody has published an answer. King Arthur and the USDA each weigh one cocoa without saying which process it went through, so we cannot give you two numbers. If a recipe leans on the difference, weigh the cocoa in your tin.
Sources
USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy for the 86 gram cup and the 5.4 gram tablespoon. Australian Women's Weekly, Sanitarium and Chelsea for the metric cup. The Kagawa Nutrition University standard tables, as reproduced by Benricho, and Kyoritsu Foods for the two Japanese figures. Full citations on the sources page.