Somewhere in the past two years, the chocolate industry discovered that people have ears.
The evidence is not subtle. Searches for chocolate bar fillings rose by something close to 190 per cent in a single quarter of 2025, and they have shown no particular interest in settling down since. A pistachio bar layered with shredded kataifi pastry, invented in Dubai and distributed largely by phone camera, achieved more for crisp textures in eighteen months than a decade of orderly product development. Supermarket shelves that used to sell flavour now sell layers; popcorn, biscuit, honeycomb, freeze-dried raspberry, anything that resists the tooth for a moment before giving way.
Barry Callebaut, which supplies a great deal of the world's chocolate and therefore has reason to pay attention, put numbers to it earlier this year. Across a survey of more than 24,000 people in two dozen countries, roughly 44 per cent said unexpected textures strongly appealed to them, rising to about 52 per cent among millennials and Gen Z. The report's phrase for what people actually want is multisensorial, which is a long word for wanting to hear something happen.
None of this is remotely new
Praline is essentially a seventeenth-century argument that a nut improves when you caramelise it and then break it. Feuilletine, the crushed crepe flake that gives half the bonbons in Europe their snap, has been sitting in French kitchens since long before anyone thought to film it. Nougatine, croquant, roasted hazelnut, honeycomb; the confectioner's toolkit has been noisy for a very long time.
What has changed is that texture used to be a technical decision made quietly at the bench, and now it is the front of the box. The craft is the same. The marketing has caught up.
Why crunch is harder than it looks
The enemy of a crisp thing is water. Feuilletine, caramelised nuts and biscuit will all go limp within hours of meeting anything wet, which is why they are traditionally bound in fat rather than moisture; praline paste, nut butter, cocoa butter. Chocolate is a fat, and a well-made shell is effectively a seal. That is not decoration, it is the only reason the crunch survives the journey from the workshop to a sofa in Kent three weeks later.
Grind size matters as much as sealing. Too coarse and the piece fights back unpleasantly; too fine and it turns to sand and the whole point evaporates. Every crisp element in a filled chocolate represents someone deciding, fairly precisely, how loud they want the thing to be.
There is also the less flattering use of texture, which is bulk. Inclusions are cheaper than good chocolate. A bar can be made to feel generous by filling it with crumbs, and a certain amount of what is currently being sold as texture innovation is simply thinner chocolate wearing a costume. The test is straightforward enough; take the crunch away and see whether anything is left worth eating.
We have no particular objection to the trend. Contrast is one of the oldest pleasures in confectionery, and a room full of people rediscovering it is a good week for anyone who works with praline. But a crunch should be something a chocolate earns, not something it hides behind.