How to Choose Good Chocolate

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.

How to read a chocolate label: start with the ingredient order

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.

What cocoa percentage really means (and why it is not quality)

This might be the most useful thing I can tell you.

More cacao is not automatically better. It is more intense, less sweet, and often more revealing.

Cocoa percentage tells you how much of the bar is cacao by weight, mass and butter combined. The rest is mostly sugar (and in milk bars, milk solids). A 70% dark bar is roughly 30% non-cacao. In a two-ingredient bar, that means 30% sugar. A 70% with added cocoa butter can taste smoother than another 70% without it, because the butter dilutes the bitterness.

I would rather have Heinde & Verre’s 71% Pristine Nativo than most 85% bars I have tasted. The 71% knows what it is. The 85% often does not. Read the percentage as sweetness and intensity, not as a quality medal.

Fat: cocoa butter belongs, substitute fats do not

Confession: I am a big fan of dietary fat, especially cocoa butter. It is the reason chocolate is not just “cocoa plus sugar”. Cocoa butter is the fat phase that gives a bar its snap, gloss, and the way it melts on your tongue and releases aroma. Replace it with cheaper fats and you have changed the category, even if the wrapper still says chocolate.

EU labelling rules allow some vegetable fats in certain categories. For a quality-focused choice, the rule is simple. Added non-cocoa fats in a plain bar are not a quality signal.

Emulsifiers: not all the same

Emulsifiers help fat and cocoa solids stay dispersed. They also help a bar flow through industrial equipment. There is a hierarchy.

Lecithin alone is not a verdict. Plenty of decent makers use a small amount for flow. PGPR plus a long ingredient list plus a vague origin is the honest signal of industrial confectionery.

Flavouring: cacao should not need perfume

Cacao carries hundreds of aroma compounds. A careful single-origin bar should taste like itself, without help.

Single origin chocolate: country is good, specificity is better

Origin language is where wrapper marketing and wrapper quality diverge. “Belgian chocolate” or “Swiss chocolate” describes a manufacturing style. Both countries mostly do not grow cacao. The label tells you nothing about where the bean came from.

The better hierarchy looks like this:

On Chof you can browse bars by named origin to see how this plays out. Specificity tends to track quality. Makers confident in their cacao are willing to name where it comes from.

Bean-to-bar chocolate (and tree-to-bar): useful, not magic

Bean-to-bar means the maker controls the transformation from raw bean to finished bar in their own workshop. Tree-to-bar adds the farm side, with a maker who grows the cacao or is tied to a single plantation.

Bean-to-bar is a control signal, not a halo. I have tasted bean-to-bar bars that were excellent and bean-to-bar bars that were forgettable. The label tells you the maker owns the result. It does not tell you the result is good. The worst bean-to-bar bars still beat most industrial chocolate on disclosure. They are just not necessarily good chocolate.

Alkalisation and Dutch processed cocoa: a quiet warning sign

Alkalisation (also called Dutching) treats cocoa with an alkaline solution. It reduces acidity and bitterness, darkens the colour, and makes the taste more uniform.

Useful in cocoa powder for baking, where you want predictable colour and a softer flavour. In a plain chocolate bar, it does the opposite of what you want. It flattens origin character and points to optimisation for shelf appeal.

Less than 1% of the bars in the Chof catalog are alkalised, and the ones that are usually wear it as a small line on the back:

• “cocoa processed with alkali”
• “alkalised cocoa” or “alkalized cocoa”
• “Dutch processed” or “Dutched”

On Chof, alkalisation is one of the negative signals Chof Score picks up under Process.

What Chof Score actually looks at

Chof Score is the quality score that orders bars on Chof. It is not a taste rating. It is a structural reading of how serious a bar is about the signals that usually predict good chocolate. Four pillars do most of the work.

Two safety nets sit on top. Bars with substitute fats or identity failures (a “white chocolate” without cocoa butter, for example) get capped. So do bars with credible safety failures, like heavy metal limits exceeded.

How much evidence we have on a bar, and how consistent that evidence is, also shapes the final number. A bar with strong origin disclosure but no information on how it was made will not be scored as if everything were known. Unproven claims do not get to drive the score.

Chof Score in action: Top 20 Chocolate Bars. Those bars are not ranked by reviews or popularity. They are ranked by what their wrappers and disclosures actually say.

Same percentage, different bar

Both of these are 70% dark bars made with cocoa, sugar, and cocoa butter. No PGPR. No vegetable fat. No vanillin. No alkalisation. On the front, they look almost identical. Chof Score puts them nine points apart. Here is why.

Both bars are good. Both pass every check on this page. The nine-point Chof Score gap comes down to three things Heinde & Verre tells you that Vivani does not: which farm the cacao came from, which year it was harvested, and how it was fermented. That is what specificity buys.

What the wrapper never tells you

A bar can pass every check on this page and still taste flat. The wrapper tells you what the maker is willing to disclose. Tasting tells you what survived the maker’s roast.

In competition judging, samples are anonymised. I cannot tell you which bars I have judged. But the patterns from those flights are clear. The most common quality killers are not on the wrapper at all: fermentation character (slaty, vinegary, smoky), texture defects (sandy, gritty), a roast that flattens the bean, a finish that disappears too fast. None of these show up on a label.

The wrapper checks below help you avoid the worst. Your mouth tells you the rest. Treat this guide as the floor, not the ceiling.

Real bars that show this in practice

Real bars from the Chof app, picked because they illustrate the principles above. Selection: Chof Score plus diversity of category and accessibility.

Good supermarket-accessible signals

Easier to find in larger grocers, organic shops, and specialty supermarkets in the Netherlands and the wider EU. Not the rarest or highest-scoring bars, but proof that ingredient hygiene and origin specificity are possible at this level.

Specialty bars worth tasting

The kind of bars Chof was built around. Short ingredient lists, named regions or farms, no alkalisation, real cocoa butter, detailed process disclosure. Taste one of these next to a supermarket dark bar. That is the fastest way to understand why this article exists.

Dutch makers worth knowing

If you are reading this from the Netherlands, three makers based here are consistently strong on every criterion above. I am in the Netherlands too, so worth a little extra attention. :)

Wrapper red flags

You will see this label, or something close, on a lot of bars in the confectionery aisle:

Translated: a sweet confectionery base with chocolate character. Sugar first, substitute fats, PGPR, vague flavouring, no origin. Nothing wrong with eating it. Just do not confuse it with a bar that is trying to show you a place.

Frequently asked questions

A note on Chof Score methodology

The example bars come from the Chof app. Selected by combining Chof Score with category diversity, supermarket accessibility, and country balance. Chof is independent of any maker.

Chof is built and maintained by Felipe, an IICCT Level 2 certified chocolate taster and International Chocolate Awards judge.

Further reading on Chof