Take a look at the ingredient list of the best-selling chocolate candy in America and you’ll see a lot of stuff you’d probably rather not ingest. According to CNBC data, M&Ms is the most popular chocolate in America. And according to information sourced from the M&Ms site, these tasty little bites feature less than desirable ingredients like cornstarch, corn syrup, Blue 2 Lake, Yellow 5, Red 40 Lake, and more. Long story short, there’s a reason these highly popular chocolates are also highly affordable: they are made with cheap ingredients. The nine chocolate brands featured here, on the other hand, are made with the highest quality ingredients. You won’t find any artificial colors, or corn syrup here, and real cocoa butter is usually the first ingredient. And yes, they are aboslutely delicious. And more expensive.
All chocolate from Alter Eco is organic and certified as fair trade, so you can feel good about what you’re putting in your body and you can feel good about how it got there. Their chocolate bars, like their Classic Blackout, are very high in cacao and quite low in added sugar. The chocolates are made without preservatives or any artificial ingredients.
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The mission statement of this chocolatier is “no,” as in “no weird ingredients. Ever.” All Hu chocolate bars start with the same three base ingredients, which are organic cacao, organic unrefined coconut sugar, and organic fair trade cocoa butter. From there, you’ll get things like hazelnut, organic peppermint oil, and sea salt—things you have heard of and can pronounce, in other words.
Many of Lily’s chocolate bars have no sugar added, like the company’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Bar. It does feature Stevia as a sweetener, and many people do strive to avoid that sugar substitute, but the bulk of the ingredients are high quality, so if you want a tasty chocolate bar and you’re trying to cut out sugar, this brand is a good choice.
Regular Lindt chocolates, those tasty individually-wrapped spheres of sweetness, e.g., can contain quite a few ingredients that are not of the finest quality, such as vegetable fat, milk powder, and emulsifiers, in the case of their classic Lindor Truffles. The Lindt Excellence line, however, features chocolates made with fewer and better ingredients, such as the Lindt Excellence Supreme Dark bar, which consists of just chocolate, cocoa powder, cocoa butter, sugar, and vanilla.
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Made in the stone-ground Mexican style, these unique chocolates check all the boxes a customer concerned with quality and production could ask for. They are certified organic, they are non-GMO, they are Direct Trade confirmed, and they are kosher, gluten-free, and vegan. Also, the unique chocolate discs come in amazing flavors like Chipotle Chili, Cinnamon, and Salted Almond.
Much like the chocolate bars from Alter Eco, the bars Theo produces are organic and are fair trade certified. They are also on the expensive side, like many of their counterparts, with a single bar selling for around $3.75 even when bought in bulk, but just look at the ingredient list in, say, the brand’s Chocolate Sea Salt Organic Bar: cocoa beans, cane sugar, cocoa butter, sea salt. And that’s it.
Nib Mor offers a lot of great chocolate flavors, every one of which is made with at least 72% cacao. (Some are 80%, for the record.) The rest of the ingredients are all safe and familiar, and all Nib Mor products are Rainforest Alliance Certified. They offer options like Mint, Tart Cherry, Sea Salt, Blueberry, and more.
Chocolove’s rich, complex chocolate bars are heavier on sugar compared to the many other options, so don’t confuse quality with healthiness here, but in terms of quality, many of the unique chocolates this brand offers are hard to match. That includes things like a vibrantly pink chocolate bar they offer called Ruby Chocolate, an effectively new type of chocolate altogether. Chocolove also offers flavors like Coffee Crunch and Salted Caramel in Dark Chocolate and Cherries and Almonds in Dark Chocolate.
Steven John
Steven John is a freelancer writer for Eat This, Not That! based just outside New York City. Read more
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