A 73% dark chocolate bar from Chocolates Artesanos Isabel: cocoa, cocoa butter, cane sugar and soy lecithin, all Fairtrade certified and organic. 80 g.
You are buying one 80 g bar. You may see "It comes in boxes of 10 packs" attached to this product elsewhere — that is the wholesale case quantity, written for shops.
CONTAINS SOY — and the 65% does not
Worth flagging at the top, because it runs against what people expect.
This bar contains soy lecithin. The 65% bar from the same maker does not — its ingredients are cocoa, cocoa butter, cane sugar and vanilla, with no emulsifier at all.
Almost everybody assumes the darker, more intense chocolate is the purer one. Here it is the other way round. If you are avoiding soy, buy the 65%.
It is gluten-free and milk-free, and suitable for vegans.
What soy lecithin is doing
Not padding. Lecithin is an emulsifier that 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 and take a good temper.
The amount is tiny, typically well under half a per cent. It is a legitimate technical ingredient rather than a cheapening one, and it is in the overwhelming majority of chocolate sold anywhere. It simply matters if you are one of the people who has to avoid soy, in which case a fraction of a per cent is still a fraction of a per cent.
What 73% means
The combined proportion of cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Which makes this bar roughly 27% sugar, against about 35% for the 65% — that is the difference you actually taste.
The number says nothing about quality. A high percentage of poor cocoa is worse than a lower percentage of good cocoa, and fermentation on the farm in the days after harvest determines more about how chocolate tastes than almost anything that follows.
Note also that this bar has no vanilla, where the 65% does. Vanilla in dark chocolate rounds off harsh edges; without it, you taste the beans more directly — which is a choice, and which flatters good cocoa and exposes poor cocoa.
The certifications
FLO-Fairtrade: a guaranteed minimum price to farmer organisations plus a social premium the cooperative decides how to spend — meaningful in an industry with well-documented labour problems. CAAE: the Andalusian organic certifier. FSC: the cardboard, from responsibly managed forests.
An orphan footnote
The producer's ingredient list carries a marker for "(3) Km0 raw material (local production)" that is never applied to anything. Cocoa does not grow in Spain.
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
CHOCOLATES ARTESANOS ISABEL
