A 65% dark chocolate bar from Chocolates Artesanos Isabel. Four ingredients: cocoa, cocoa butter, cane sugar and vanilla — all Fairtrade certified and all organic. 80 g.
You are buying one 80 g bar. You may see "It comes in boxes of 10 units" attached to this product elsewhere — that is the wholesale case quantity, written for shops.
Four ingredients, and no soy — which matters here
This bar is gluten-free, milk-free and soy-free, and suitable for vegans.
Worth flagging clearly, because the 73% bar from the same maker contains soy lecithin. That is counterintuitive — people reasonably assume the darker, more intense chocolate is the purer one — and it is exactly the sort of thing that catches somebody out. If you are avoiding soy, this is the bar; the 73% is not.
Why so few ingredients is unusual
Almost all commercial chocolate contains an emulsifier, usually soy lecithin. It is added because it reduces the viscosity of liquid chocolate, which lets a maker use less cocoa butter — the most expensive ingredient — while still getting the chocolate to flow through machinery.
Leaving it out means using more cocoa butter and accepting a thicker chocolate to work with. It costs more and it is the mark of a maker who is not economising on the expensive part.
What 65% means, and what it does not
It is the total proportion of cocoa solids and cocoa butter combined. The rest, essentially, is sugar — so a 65% bar is around 35% sugar, and a 73% bar around 27%.
What the number does not tell you is quality. A high percentage of poor cocoa is worse than a lower percentage of good cocoa. Percentage tells you about sweetness and intensity, not about how well the beans were grown or fermented — and fermentation, which happens on the farm in the days after harvest, does more to determine how chocolate tastes than almost anything that follows.
The certifications, and what each covers
FLO-Fairtrade guarantees a minimum price to farmer organisations, insulating them from commodity price collapses, plus a social premium the cooperative decides how to spend. In cocoa — an industry with well-documented problems including child labour in West Africa — this is a meaningful rather than decorative certification.
CAAE is the Andalusian organic certification body, one of Spain's principal organic certifiers.
FSC covers the cardboard: wood from responsibly managed forests, tracked through the chain of custody.
An orphan footnote
The producer's ingredient list carries a footnote marker, "(3) Km0 raw material (local production)", that is never applied to any ingredient. Cocoa does not grow in Spain, so it could not have been.
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
