Is dark chocolate vegan?
The answer to this question is, that it should be.
High quality dark chocolate should only contain a few ingredients. High street dark chocolate will commonly be made with sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla flavouring and soya lecithin.
Chocolate makers like us can make dark chocolate from just one ingredient, cocoa beans! But this will be 100% dark chocolate and might not appeal to everyone.
Our dark chocolate is vegan and is made from just three ingredients. Cocoa nibs, sugar and cocoa butter. No added flavouring or lecithin. Some makers don’t add cocoa butter so it will just be cocoa nibs and sugar.
So dark chocolate is vegan by default because there’s traditionally no milk added to dark chocolate.
Now here comes the but…I’d recommend always checking the ingredients.
An example of when this isn’t the case is ‘Bournville Classic’.
Cadbury, the biggest chocolate name in the UK reintroduced milk powder into their ‘Bournville Classic’ dark chocolate bar.
The addition of milk powder to Bournville no longer makes it suitable for vegans, which caused a lot of outrage at the time as people enjoyed the chocolate and no longer can as it’s now made with milk powder.
This makes me question ‘is Bournville Classic dark chocolate still dark chocolate now it has milk powder added into it’? And is it dark chocolate anyway? The ingredients suggest that ‘Bournville Classic’ is a 36% dark chocolate bar, which is very low. Dark chocolate is normally around 60%-80% cocoa. This means that the other 64% of ‘Bournville Classic’ is made up of sugar, fat, milk powder and other things. Including palm oil.
We have and never will use palm oil in any of our products.
In conclusion to the question ‘is dark chocolate vegan’, dark chocolate should be vegan but always check the ingredients. It might say on the packaging ‘made in an environment milk’ which is on our packaging, or ‘may contain traces of milk’. This means that it’s made in the same factory or machines where milk is handled. It’s for allergen notification, rather than direct ingredients used in the product.
If there’s no milk listed in the ingredients then it’s suitable for vegans.
You can find try our Dark Chocolate Collection here, a trio of dark chocolate, two single origin and one flavoured.
Or looking for something sweeter? Check out our Vegan Collection here - two milk and white chocolate bars, all 100% vegan!