Have you ever taken a close look at the Hershey’s Special Dark® label? I’ve been told that it’s the best selling dark chocolate in America. But it’s not—it might be a big seller, but it’s not dark chocolate. Wait, but maybe it is ...

Type(s): Eating Chocolate
Style: American
Taste Rating: Ordinary
Overall Value Rating: Ordinary

... because it turns out that “Special Dark®” is a trademark not a literal description of the product. In fact, it turns out there is no actual US Food and Drug Administration Standard of Identity (definition) for something called “Dark Chocolate.”

There are standards of identity for Milk Chocolate and White Chocolate, and there’s a standard of identity for something called “Sweet Chocolate” but there is separate standard of identity for dark chocolate.

If you carefully read the label of a bar of Special Dark® you see that it says that it is “Mildly ‘Sweet Chocolate’”—“only” the name is “Special Dark®."By law, therefore, it cannot contain ingredients that aren’t specifically identified as being acceptable in “Sweet Chocolate” &en; which encompasses a very wide range of products.

According to the FDA, a “sweet chocolate” must contain not less than 15% by weight of cocoa liquor. There isn’t even any legal distinction between semisweet or bittersweet chocolate; according to the definition, “Semisweet chocolate or bittersweet chocolate is sweet chocolate that contains not less than 35 percent by weight of chocolate liquor.” Perhaps most surprisingly (well to me, anyway), the standard of definition for sweet chocolate allows milk as an ingredient! According to the standard of identity (§163.123):

Optional dairy ingredients [allowed in sweet chocolate]:
(4)(i) Cream, milkfat, butter;
(4)(ii) Milk, concentrated milk, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, dried milk;
(4)(iii) Skim milk, concentrated skim milk, evaporated skim milk, sweetened condensed skim milk, nonfat dry milk;
(4)(iv) Concentrated buttermilk, dried buttermilk;
(4)(v) Malted milk

Looked at this way, the ingredients in Hershey’s Special Dark® “mildly sweet chocolate” are perfectly in line with the standard of identity for Sweet Chocolate:

     Sugar; Chocolate; Cocoa Butter; Cocoa processed with Alkali; Milk Fat; Lactose (Milk); Soy Lecithin; PGPR (emulsifier) [ed - PGPR stands for polyglycerol polyricinoleate which is produced through the esterification of condensed castor oil fatty acids with polyglycerol, aren’t you glad you asked?]; Vanillin; Artificial Flavor; and Milk.

For some time now, I’ve been making a simple distinction between milk chocolate and dark chocolate: Milk Chocolate is any chocolate that has milk in it and dark chocolate is any chocolate that does not have milk in it. This turns out not to be true in any legal sense.

Nonetheless, I think it is a useful distinction and is one that I will continue to use and promote, along the generalization that semi-sweet chocolate contains up to 60-70% cacao and chocolate with cacao content above 70% will be called bittersweet, with the ultimate classification dependent on the depth of the roast of the beans (which contributes greatly to perceived sweetness as well as bitterness).

Now that that is all out of the way, how does Hershey’s Special Dark® stand up?

I often use this chocolate in tasting events because it provides a very familiar benchmark for taste for Americans and, especially for people new to comparative chocolate tasting, having a familiar point of reference is very helpful.

One property of the chocolate, on the nose, in the mouth, and on the finish, is sweetness. The very mild chocolate smell is sweet and that sweetness dominates over the taste of the chocolate, and there is no nuance in the taste, it’s the same from beginning to end. All of the milk fat in the chocolate contributes to a pasty, almost gummy texture while eating and on the finish.

Interestingly, no matter where I am giving tasting sessions, someone always prefers Hershey’s Special Dark® to everything else that it’s being compared with. On closer examination, the reason is always the familiar taste of the product that evokes special memories of childhood. Of course, this has nothing to do with the quality of the chocolate and everything to do with why chocolate is loved so much by so many, because of the positive emotions it evokes.

This is also the reason for giving it the “Ordinary” rating, not a rating of Poor. In the US, Hershey’s is everyday eating chocolate for the vast majority of people. It is ordinary in the most basic sense of the word. (If this were the UK, Cadbury’s would be the “ordinary” chocolate; in parts of Europe it might be Milka, or Nestle.)

And, believe it or not, there are chocolates that are far, far, worse.

Company Information:

Hershey Foods Corporation
Hershey, PA 17033
http://www.hersheys.com
800-468-1714