How Much Chocolate Do We Eat?

From the graphic above and down under you can see for each country how much chocolate per person per year (2007) was consumed in kilos. Found this graphic on the site of Alpha Galileo Europe’s site of research news, thanks to David Bradley (@sciencebase).

Eighteen EU countries were among the world’s top 26 chocolate confectioneries consumers in 2007, ranking from 11.85 kg eaten per capita in Ireland, to 4.5 kg in France and 1.04 kg in Poland. The EU 27 consumed in total 2.5 million tons of chocolate products that year, which account for around half of the global consumption world-wide

The post is also about a new method to analyze fats used in the making of chocolate. This is important because according to the Chocolate Directive (Directive 2000/36/EC) it’s only allowed to add up to 5% of vegetable fats other than cocoa butter in chocolate products. When these fats are added to chocolate, European legislation requires that consumers be informed by appropriate labelling of the product. The threshold of 5% is also an essential requirement for these products to move freely within the internal market.

Before the development of this test there was no validated methodology in this field. It was therefore hard to check whether manufacturers were correctly reporting the amount of vegetable fats other than cocoa butter in milk chocolate.

Does this only apply to milk chocolate and not to dark chocolate? I don’t know, any one to help us out? By the way white chocolate is no chocolate, agree?