35
votes
‘I took two bites and had to spit it out’: US candy makers are phasing out real cocoa in chocolate in some products
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Aimee Levitt
- Published
- Mar 11 2026
- Word count
- 1473 words
I've had a rather long day, but something about reading this absolutely sent me. They just became aware of the poor optics of...profiting from slavery? The absurdity is too funny. I needed a laugh.
More to the point of chocolate itself; I will gladly pay higher prices for ethically and sustainably sourced cacao. I also like trying new things so I'll have to keep an eye out for cacao alts like @kacey mentioned (though I haven't seen those at my local stores and may have to venture online to find some). I have no brand loyalty towards things like Hershey's or whatever. I really dislike how sweet milk chocolate is so most candy bars are a miss for me. I suppose I am not really their target demographic. They weren't getting my money to begin with and will continue to uh...not get it?
As an unpaid brand ambassador for this company I highly recommend you try it. Very expensive and the price has gone up 50% in the last 6 years due to shortages. But it may be the best dark chocolate you ever have. Just get some bars and don’t bother much with the confections. Those are great as well but don’t let you appreciate the quality as much.
I don't remember if I already tried Dandelion, but I recognize the name from various bean-to-bar stores I went to and would generally recommend anything bean-to-bar.
More specifically, here is a small selection of the ones I tried and would gladly recommend:
For those kind of producers, dark chocolate in the 60% to 80% range are the most common and are a good starting point if you want to explore the space. Some also make dark milk versions, which also have a high percentage of cacao. By definition, the difference between dark chocolate and milk chocolate is that milk chocolate also contains milk powder. So it's totally possible to have milk chocolate that is no more sweet than dark chocolate. Finally, you have chocolate made with some additional ingredients. That's where chocolate makers can be very creative. For example, Fu Wan makes some tea-infused chocolate (those are absolutely delicious).
If you're new to this space, I would also recommend tasting those chocolate by just getting a small piece and letting it melt in your mouth instead of chewing it. That's how you get the most of them. The main exception are the bars with inclusions (stuff like cacao nibs), that often have a more balanced tasting profile when you chew the inclusions while the chocolate is melting in your mouth.
Outside of the recommendations I made above, I would also trust any chocolate who received an Academy of Chocolate award or an International Chocolate Awards. Such bars will have a logo of the award(s) on them.
Is that the chocolate company from San Francisco? My wife visited a number of years ago and brought back probably 250$ worth of chocolate bars from there that we slowly consumed over a few years. Definitely the best chocolate I've ever had, couldn't believe how complex the flavours could be and it was ethically sourced. I likened it to high end wine or coffee tastings where subtle process differences make a huge impact on the final product in unexpected ways (if you're not a master brewer/roaster/chocolatier, that is).
Dandelion is excellent. I haven't noticed the price going up >50% since 2021 when I started buying them -- it was 10-15/bar, and now it's 12-17. When possible, it's really cool to get matching SF and Tokyo bars to really see how the roasting profile affects the flavor.
I guess the first time I had them was 2018 for $7-10 per bar
Man, that price was an absolute steal
There is a chocolate fest in my area every year. The first time I went I was very surprised by how many different makers are in my area, they’re all over Washington and Oregon, most of which you’ll rarely see in a store.
Just like small coffee roasters they tend to be very careful in sourcing. There’s no such thing as buying completely local chocolate unless you live near the equator, but I do like to support local companies when I can.
Not just profiting from slavery, but child slavery. They're both abhorrent but I feel like the optics of child slavery have to be even worse.
So the article's tone is dismissive, but my hot take is that cocoa alternatives are actually great! I've been following one that was mentioned in the article -- ChoViva (née Qoa and Nocoa) -- for quite a while, and their process is pretty sensible: the chocolatey flavour we associate with cocoa comes primarily from its fermentation and roasting (see, for example, Nile Red discovering this first hand), so fermenting other foodstuffs was a clear path forwards to a more sustainable snack. Cocoa pods are, after all, exclusively grown in highly exploited countries as part of an extractive industry which cares little for pesky things like environmental devastation and human rights, so finding alternatives for it -- especially considering our growing and insatiable desire -- is, imo, an objective good. Not everything needs to be a perfect, pure, chocolate experience -- that's why we have milk chocolate, white chocolate, "chocolatey" treats, Hershey's butyric-acid filled chocolate, etc.
Couple of quick side notes:
(tangent note: hah, I missed this because I have a filter excluding The Guardian from my feed. Explains my initial reaction of taking two glances at the article and spitting it out)
Treets uses choviva and I found it pretty compelling.
However: ChoViva uses palm oil which is a major deforestation driver and orang outang killer (not only by destroying their forest but also by actively killing them, look it up if you think you have the stomach). So that’s a no go for me until they reformulate without palm oil. What’s the point if the substitute also causes suffering and destruction on a massive scale.
Ach, wasn't aware of that. It'd be really nice if fully hydrogenated vegetable oils could overcome the stigma and gain broader acceptance, for precisely this reason :/ although people hate canola because it's a seed oil, so perhaps my expectations are too high.
I still don't understand the current row over seed oils. Beef tallow is obviously unhealthy, but somehow it's the health food of the moment. It doesn't make sense.
It's not based on any particular fact, it's just something to hate on, in part because it's "processed". Also the word "inflammation" has been abused to the point of needing to be put in the ICU.
We've come full circle from people realizing how bad beef tallow is for you and transitioning to using lower saturated fat oils. It's simultaneously funny and tragic.
I’d be very glad if all the stuff I personally classify as “fake chocolate” - white chocolate, milk chocolate, and even dark chocolate that is less than 50% cacao - were to actually become fake chocolate. In my personal opinion, chocolate should be at least partially bitter and ideally a bit fruity, and the whole point of most of those other chocolate products is to get rid of those beautiful flavors. If the producers of these watered down products end up using an alternative it means more “real” chocolate for us snobs.
Personally I found Reece’s to be bad far before the current iteration. It was a childhood favorite but it’s amazing how they can stuff so much fat and sugar into them and still have so little flavor. Simple two ingredient peanut butter cups are divine and it’s a perfect example where the using dark chocolate is usually preferable to milk, at least among the small sample of people I have asked.
I blame the exposure to dark chocolate as a kid! I hated it then and it took me way too long to give it another shot again, but I love it now. Adult palates prefer more bitter tastes than child palates do, from what I remember a teacher saying, and it played out that way for me too.
Small aside: Nocoa is so much better a name than ChoViva! Such a shame they changed it!
Good to see Chocolonely mentioned. Nowadays this is about the only large bar of chocolate I'll buy "regularly" for a premium price.
If you're in the UK it's actually not that expensive. I believe it's usually £4, but I have seen it this year for £3 at two supermarkets on offer. This price is not that far off what Cadbury's costs now.
I couldn't believe that I could get Ritter Sport (mostly chocolate) cheaper than Cadbury's (mostly not) in the supermarket a while back. How on earth can they justify stuffing their product with so much crap when it's more expensive than good chocolate??
And sitting right next to chocolate bars in the checkout lane is chewing gum, which you may already know is often made from plastic.
Obviously off topic for this post, but it would genuinely be nice if it was easier to find gums with a plastic free base that also work well for making your mouth feel fresh. The micro plastic side is an issue I haven't considered, so thanks for sharing. I personally feel more bothered by creating plastic waste when I chew gum. :/
I'll just sit here quietly and eat my Whittaker's (for anyone not from NZ, https://www.whittakers.co.nz/en_NZ)
Thank you Whittaker's for saving us from the scourge that is Cadbury. There is simply no other type of chocolate in my snack drawer.
This feels a little bit like the whole "Most people don't really care about or like fossil fuels. People actually care about energy that's abundant and reliable," issue. Fossil fuel companies obviously spend oodles of money to try to convince people they like fossil fuels, but I'm not sure most people would really hold that strongly when offered any other fuel source that offered the same benefits (high energy dense and transportable being big ones probably).
I love chocolate and end up buying less chocolate in order to buy high quality chocolate for eating and baking with. But most of the time, I'm not sure I'd really care if it's actually chocolate I'm eating if it had the same taste complexity and texture of real chocolate. I'd love to be able to buy a cheaper chocolate tasting alternative to use for something like chocolate chip cookies (where some of the nuance of the flavors are lost), and could save the premium stuff to enjoy on its own. I'm more concerned about the ethics of how the chocolate (or alternative) are sources and made than I am about it actually being chocolate. So I'm honestly rooting for good tasting alternatives to make it to market. Though I could say the same thing about plant based meats and the like. If the alternative is tasty, and maybe better for the environment, who really cares at the end of the day? But maybe I'm in the minority if you were to poll enough people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯