Sugar has spent the better part of two centuries doing a job nobody ever thanked it for, and it is now being quietly made redundant.
The evidence arrives, as these things do, in the form of a survey. Barry Callebaut, which supplies a good deal of the world's chocolate industry and therefore has every reason to know, put the question to roughly 24,000 people across two dozen markets. Around four in five said they now look at the ingredients list before buying chocolate, and would prefer it to be short. Three in four said they actively try to avoid processed food. The direction of travel, in the report's phrasing, is towards less sweetness and more nuance.
This is usually written up as a health story. It is more interesting than that.
Sweetness was never the point. It was the cover.
Consider what sugar actually does in a chocolate bar. It sweetens, obviously. It also, and rather more usefully to a large manufacturer, conceals. Under fermented beans taste flat and faintly of nothing. Over roasted beans taste of ash. Cheap bulk cocoa, bought on price and blended across four countries, tastes of whatever it happens to taste of that season, which is to say inconsistent. Sugar solves all three at once. It is the most effective editing tool in the industry.
Britain has been unusually relaxed about this. There exists a legal category called family milk chocolate, which permits as little as 20 per cent cocoa solids. The remaining 80 per cent is milk, fat and sugar, and in a great many bars sold in this country sugar is the first thing on the label. Not the second. The first. Whatever else that product is, it is a sugar confection with chocolate flavouring, and it has been sold to us as chocolate for so long that we stopped noticing.
So when four fifths of shoppers say they want a shorter ingredients list, they are not really asking for a diet product. They are asking to taste the thing they paid for.
Less sweet is not the same as more bitter
This is the part the trend pieces tend to muddle. Bitterness in chocolate is not a sign of seriousness; it is usually a sign of a bean that was roasted too hard or fermented too little. A well handled bean does not need rescuing. Fine cocoa from Madagascar arrives tasting of red fruit and citrus. Venezuelan criollo leans nutty and almost creamy. Ecuadorian arriba has a floral, faintly jasmine quality that survives perfectly well without help.
Take the sugar down and those flavours stop being a rumour. That is the whole promise of the trend, and also its risk, because a bar with less sugar in it is a bar with nowhere to hide. The bean has to be good. The ferment has to have been managed by someone who cared. The roast has to be judged rather than defaulted to. It is a considerably harder way to make chocolate, which is presumably why it took a consumer survey to make the industry consider it.
The parallel trend, since we are here, is botanicals: lavender, chamomile, a general drift towards flavours that read as calm rather than as sugar rush. We are watching that one with interest and some caution. Lavender is a very short walk from soap.
None of this is new, of course. It is simply the market rediscovering something small makers never had the option of forgetting. If you cannot afford to bury a mediocre bean under sugar, you buy a better bean. It works out roughly the same either way, except that the chocolate tastes of chocolate.