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How to choose chocolate (not based on percentage)
A practical guide to reading a chocolate bar wrapper, written by a certified chocolate taster and chocolate awards juror.
Most people choose chocolate using one or more of four signals: cocoa percentage, packaging (colours, words, images, fancy claims), a familiar brand, or certifications. I have judged at international competitions and tasted thousands of bars. Those four signals miss most of what matters.
I get this question frequently. In workshops, in shops, in conversations with friends. How do I choose better chocolate? How do I buy a good bar? What is good? What is not good? The shelf is loud, the claims overlap, and a thoughtful craft bar can look identical to an industrial confectionery. It is not.
Below is the answer I would like to give, but often do not have the time and space for in person. Read it like we are standing in front of the chocolate aisle together.
Short version:turn the bar over. High-quality chocolate tells you where the cacao grew, lists cocoa butter as the only added fat, keeps the ingredient list short, and skips vanillin, PGPR and alkalised cocoa. A real craft bar names a region, farm or harvest; an industrial imitation hides behind a country-of-manufacture claim like “Belgian chocolate”. Everything below is the long version.
Advice is easy to give and hard to check, so here is the benchmark. These are the labels of every craft bar catalogued on Chof, not a sample of supermarket chocolate. The selection is the whole point. This is what the shelf looks like once you are already buying well, so a bar that misses these marks is making a choice its peers did not.
Across the bars currently on Chof. The list already leans specialty. Even so, only one in six bars names a specific farm. The disclosure ladder is steeper than people think.
Ingredients sit on the back of the wrapper in descending order of weight. That gives you the skeleton of any bar in a single glance.
For a plain dark bar, look for cacao first, then sugar, sometimes cocoa butter. Two and three ingredient bars are common. Four is still fine. Past five or six in a plain bar, you are looking at confectionery, not chocolate built around the cacao itself.
Milk and white chocolate work differently. Milk powder, sugar, and cocoa butter are all doing real work, so five ingredients is normal. Sugar first in a milk bar is not automatically a scandal. It just tells you the product is more sweet than chocolatey.