What the Percentage Means, When it Comes to Chocolate...

I wanted to address a comment that I received about the health benefits of dark chocolate…it wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the entire picture either. The comment stated that to receive any health benefits from chocolate it had to be 70% or above. There are a lot of things to unpack here—firstly, what the percentage on a chocolate block means.

There is no standard across the industry about how the percentage of chocolate has to work—it’s merely an indicator of how much cocoa solids and cocoa fats are in a chocolate bar. For example, in a “true” 70% bar, you’d have 70% of the ingredients of a bar made up of cocoa beans—assuming the average make up of a cocoa bean is 50% fat, it means that you’ve got 35% cocoa solids, 35% cocoa butter and 30% sugar in that bar.

However, this is where it gets a bit tricky. Producers and makers can alter the ratios of percentage by using less beans and supplementing with cocoa butter—this is often to alter texture or mouthfeel (and is where a lot of commercial producers are starting to substitute in things like vegetable, palm oil or emulsifiers to cut costs). What this actually means is that you’re getting less of the “beneficial” part of the cocoa, but a business or company, by using a larger percentage of cocoa fat can still label it as 70% chocolate. For example, I could use 50% beans, and supplement with 20% cocoa butter—meaning that the cocoa solids portion of the bar is now sitting around 25% instead of 35% and 45% cocoa fat.

This is where the statement that chocolate has to be 70% to gain health benefits falls a little flat. There is no standard across the board, and on a lot of mass produced packaging, no transparency around the breakdown of this percentage. It’s what’s in the other side of the percentage like the sugar and the milk powder that are more there for flavour than benefits that we should also be talking about.

Secondly, the way that cocoa is processed can have a big impact on the flavanols that everyone is so mad about! Things like heat really impact the breakdown, so processes like fermentation, roasting, conching, grinding and age can all impact these compounds.

While Meltdown Artisan is not a health brand, we do take our ingredients seriously—this means using organic ingredients where we can, sourcing premium quality beans (often organically produced, though not necessarily always certified as this has significant costs to the farmers), roasting lightly and also making chocolate with higher percentages of cocoa by ratio than what you would find on the supermarket shelf.

It stems from the understanding that what we consume is super important to our wellbeing, but also from the perspective that some things in life are simply meant to be enjoyed—not for the gains, or the macros, or the health benefits, but purely for the pleasure that it can bring.