A vegan bar of cashews, coconut and dried sour cherries, coated in a dairy-free white chocolate. Sweetened with rice syrup and coconut sugar.
CONTAINS CASHEWS AND ALMOND
Two tree nuts, both as ingredients rather than traces: cashews in the bar, and almond protein in the white coating. Both are named allergens under EU law.
These bars are usually listed as a raw ingredient dump with no allergen statement at the top, which is exactly the wrong way round for a product containing two nuts.
About the "white chocolate"
Worth being precise, because the law is. Under EU rules white chocolate must contain at least 20% cocoa butter and at least 14% milk solids.
This coating is dairy-free — the creaminess comes from coconut cream and coconut sugar, with almond protein — so it cannot meet the legal definition however good it tastes, which is why it is described as a couverture rather than as white chocolate. It is a cocoa butter coating with plant ingredients in place of milk.
The same is true of every vegan white chocolate on the market. It is not a defect; it is a definition.
Rice syrup — and one thing worth knowing
Rice syrup is made by breaking rice starch down into sugars with enzymes. It is nearly all glucose and maltose with almost no fructose, which is why it is used in bars aimed at people avoiding fructose.
It is still sugar, and it has a high glycaemic index — higher than table sugar, because glucose raises blood sugar faster than fructose does. "Refined-sugar-free" and "low glycaemic" are not the same thing, and rice syrup is a good example of a sweetener that is one and emphatically not the other.
One further note, for completeness: rice takes up arsenic from soil more than most crops, and rice syrup has been the subject of studies on inorganic arsenic. Levels in European products are regulated, and an occasional bar is not a concern — it is worth knowing if rice syrup is a daily staple for you or for a small child.
Sour cherries
Prunus cerasus is a different species from the sweet cherry, and it is the one that actually tastes of cherry — the sharp, almost almondy flavour that flavourings imitate. Dried, it concentrates further, and it is exactly the right thing to cut through a sweet coconut-and-cashew base.