How much cocoa is in milk chocolate? Claire answers this in her latest video explainer
If you follow us on Instagram, you may have seen co-founder Claire's latest explainer showcasing how much (or how little) cocoa is in the UK's biggest milk chocolate brand vs how much cocoa is in ours....the answers might shock you!
To help visualise the contents, Claire has filled 2 glass jars with the main 3 ingredients in milk chocolate - cocoa beans, milk (which is always added as a powder, never as liquid milk however much advertising or packaging graphics might try to say otherwise) and sugar - the relevant % of each for the biggest brand in the UK and for our signature milk chocolate made exclusively for us by our chocolate partners Luker in Colombia, from fine fino de aroma cocoa beans grown in the Huila, Tumaco & Santander regions.
Put it this way, there is no comparison - our milk chocolate contains more than double the amount of cocoa as in the biggest brand (ours contains 47%) & pretty similar amount of milk (ours contains 23%) but as a result, a hugely different amount of sugar as it is a pretty straight swap (ours contains just 30% added sugar - most are over 50%) - the more cocoa there is in milk chocolate, the less sugar as milk is usually around the 20% mark, which is very much the industry norm.
The big chocolate brand also contains palm oil - why? because they replace some of the natural cocoa butter from the cocoa beans with a % of cheaper vegetable fats...one of which is always palm oil. They are only doing is to CUT costs - there is NO place for palm oil in chocolate - sorry, starting to rant now as I get very upset about this.
If a chocolate product contains palm oil, you can be pretty sure that it wont contain much cocoa (the expensive part of the product) & will be bulked out with lots of sugar....enough said.
It's very easy to work out whether a bar of chocolate contains palm oil as they have to declare it on the ingredients list on the back face of the packaging & it will also include the following statement: 'Contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter'. Proper chocolate does NOT contain palm oil! Please do not contribute to the further destruction of rain forests by supporting chocolate made with palm oil which is only being added as a cost cutting measure...its all wrong!
Click on this link to view our instagram page and then click on the 'reels' tab to view all our videos: https://www.instagram.com/chococochocolates/