An overhead flatlay on dark slate of three broken squares of dark chocolate at three different shades of brown, a small pile of cocoa nibs, a spoon of cocoa powder and a whole cacao pod split open showing white pulp and beans

How a Chocolate Bar Keeps, and What 70 Percent Actually Means

Those ten, answered short and sourced, with links to the four deeper Dispatch pieces where a question deserves a full page. The craft chocolate guide is the master; this is the FAQ beside it.

1. What does the percentage on a chocolate bar mean?

The number on a bar, 70 percent or 85 or 55, is the total weight of ingredients from the cacao bean: cocoa mass and cocoa butter. The rest is mostly sugar, and in milk chocolate, milk. A 70 percent bar is roughly 30 percent sugar; an 85 percent bar has less. The number is not a quality score, and it does not indicate flavanol content or origin. Under US rules at 21 CFR 163, chocolate labeled "bittersweet" or "semisweet" must contain at least 35 percent chocolate liquor by weight, "sweet chocolate" at least 15 percent, and "dark chocolate" is not a defined term. Milk chocolate requires at least 10 percent chocolate liquor and 12 percent milk solids. EU Directive 2000/36/EC sets the thresholds on total cocoa solids: 35 percent for dark, 25 for milk. The full breakdown is in the upcoming What the Percentage on a Chocolate Bar Means, What It Does Not, and Why Two 70 Percent Bars Can Taste Nothing Alike piece.

2. What is the difference between cocoa and cacao?

Almost nothing, and almost everything, depending on who is selling the word. In the trade the raw agricultural product from Theobroma cacao is the cacao bean, and cocoa is what the bean becomes after fermentation, drying, roasting and grinding. In the American wellness aisle "cacao" has come to imply raw and minimally processed while "cocoa" implies roasted, Dutch-processed and diminished. The chemistry is more modest. Every cacao bean is fermented before it leaves the farm, which is not raw by any culinary definition; heavy roasting and alkalization do reduce flavanol content, but the word on the label is not a reliable guide to which happened. The upcoming Cocoa or Cacao? What the Two Words Mean, What 'Raw Cacao' Actually Is, and Which Powder to Buy for What piece works the distinction through.

3. Why does chocolate sometimes turn white?

That film is bloom, either fat bloom or sugar bloom. Fat bloom, the common kind, is cocoa butter that melted in warmth and recrystallized in a looser, duller form; it looks like waxy streaks and smears when rubbed. Sugar bloom is moisture, usually condensation from the refrigerator, that dissolved the surface sugar and left it as a fine dry dust. Both are safe and cosmetic. Neither is mold, which is rare on plain chocolate because chocolate has almost no water. A bloomed bar melts back into a brownie or a cup of drinking chocolate with no loss of flavor. The full storage answer is in the upcoming Why Chocolate Turns White, Whether It Is Still Good, and How to Store It So It Never Happens piece.

4. Is dark chocolate good for you?

Real, small, and routinely oversold. Cocoa flavanols relax blood vessels; a Cochrane review of 35 trials with about 1,800 participants found a mean drop of roughly 1.8 mmHg systolic and 1.8 diastolic blood pressure from flavanol-rich cocoa over two to eighteen weeks, real and smaller than a daily walk. The larger COSMOS trial in 2022, 21,000 older adults on a cocoa flavanol extract for a median of 3.6 years, did not confirm a reduction in total cardiovascular events. Dutch-processing and heavy roasting reduce flavanols, and the wrapper says nothing about them. A dark bar is also roughly 170 calories an ounce. Eat a square because it is good, not because it is medicine. The Is Dark Chocolate Good for You? What the Studies Actually Show, and What the Wellness Copy Leaves Out piece grades every claim by evidence.

5. How long does chocolate keep, and where?

Industry rules of thumb from the Fine Chocolate Industry Association and manufacturer guidance; a well-made bar in a cool, dark cupboard beats them.

Chocolate At its best Still good
Dark, 70% and above, plain bar Twelve months Two years
Milk chocolate Six to eight months One year
White chocolate Four to six months Eight months
Bars with nuts, fruit or salt Four to eight months One year
Filled chocolates and truffles Two to four weeks Per the maker's date
Cocoa powder One year Two years or more

Store cool, dry, dark, and away from smells. The ideal is 60 to 68°F at low humidity, in a sealed tin, in a cupboard that does not sit above the stove. Old chocolate does not become unsafe; it becomes dull. A faded aroma, a soft snap and a flat flavor are the signs.

6. Should chocolate go in the refrigerator?

Ideally no. The refrigerator is humid and full of smells, and the danger is the trip out: cold chocolate meeting warm air condenses, and that moisture is what causes sugar bloom. If the kitchen runs above 75°F for weeks and there is no cooler cupboard, wrap the bar airtight in a sealed container, refrigerate, and when it comes out leave it sealed for an hour or two until it reaches room temperature. The condensation stays on the outside of the bag. Neither the refrigerator nor the freezer beats a cool cupboard.

7. Is chocolate toxic to dogs?

Yes. Chocolate contains theobromine, which humans metabolize in a few hours and dogs metabolize over roughly seventeen; it accumulates and can be fatal. The darker the chocolate the more theobromine per ounce; baking chocolate and dark bars are the most dangerous, milk chocolate less so, white chocolate mostly harmless. About 1.3 grams per kilogram of a dog's body weight of baker's chocolate produces symptoms; larger doses can be lethal. Cats are more sensitive still, but rarely eat sweets. If a dog gets into a dark bar, call the vet. Keep bars in a tin on a high shelf.

8. Why does a craft bar cost four times a supermarket bar?

Not romance. A craft maker buys named-origin beans at multiples of the commodity price, often direct from a single farm, then does small-batch roasting, winnowing, grinding, conching for hours or days, and tempering by hand. A large factory does the same steps at industrial scale on blended beans. Add hand-wrapped packaging, cold-chain shipping in summer, and margins that keep a small maker in business, and the four-times figure is arithmetic. Cacao commodity prices have not helped: 2024 saw record highs above ten thousand dollars a tonne. Our bean-to-bar piece walks the process; the live cocoa commodity piece in the Pulse covers the futures market. Producer guides for Dandelion and Dick Taylor illustrate the split.

9. Does chocolate have caffeine?

A little. A 25 gram serving of dark chocolate carries around 22 milligrams of caffeine, compared with 80 to 175 milligrams in a seven-ounce cup of coffee. Cocoa beans run 0.1 to 0.7 percent caffeine by weight, coffee beans roughly 1.2 percent. What chocolate has more of is theobromine, a milder stimulant that works longer and is the reason a square of dark eaten late can affect sleep for some people. Milk chocolate has less of both. White chocolate has neither, because it contains no cocoa solids.

10. Where does chocolate come from, and where does it grow?

The cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, was domesticated around 3300 BC in what is now Ecuador; the Mayo-Chinchipe archaeological evidence has moved the origin story south of Mesoamerica by a thousand miles and two thousand years. The Maya and Aztec chocolate drink is the older story most people know, and it was bitter, unsweetened and sometimes spiced. The solid bar arrived in 1847 with Fry's in Britain, milk chocolate in 1875 with Daniel Peter in Switzerland, conching in 1879 with Rodolphe Lindt. Today about 70 percent of the world's cacao is grown in West Africa, chiefly Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. The full arc is in our history piece, and the fermentation step, the one that decides what a bar tastes like, is in the fermentation piece.

What this page does not answer

Whether one origin is objectively better than another; that is a taste question the tasting guide works out. Whether "raw cacao" is a category worth paying for; the upcoming cocoa-or-cacao piece answers it. And whether the 2022 Consumer Reports heavy-metal findings mean a chocolate lover should stop; the short answer is that a square a day is not a concern for most adults on any published assessment, that children and people who are pregnant are the groups for whom moderation is advised, and that makers who source carefully and dry beans off the ground tend to test lower.

The bars on our chocolate shelf include the Dandelion Maya Mountain Belize 70, the Dick Taylor Fleur de Sel, the Amano Ocumare 70, and the Cuna de Piedra Comalcalco 73 with reposado mezcal, at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and shipped nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

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