Comparing Chocolate Chips

As you may know, I try only to buy chocolate made from sustainably grown cocoa now. This just means that instead of cutting down part of a rain forest to plant the crop, harvesting it for three years until the soil is ruined, and then starting over, the cocoa is planted within the rainforest, in the shade where it prefers to grow anyway, but where I assume it is more difficult to access.

The easiest way to guess that you are buying this is to look for fair-trade chocolate. That's really about economics rather than ecology, but the two seem correlated.

Still, I can't even find fair-trade chocolate chips at my usual store (HEB), so yesterday I checked over what was available at Whole Foods. I had two choices:
* Rapunzel organic dark chocolate chips with 55% cocoa
* Sunspire organic semi-sweet chocolate chips
They both cost $4.99 so I bought both to compare when I got home.

The first thing I noticed was that the Rapunzel has 10 ounces whereas the Sunspire has only 9 ounces.

The second thing I noticed is that on the receipt, Whole Foods labeled the dark chips (Rapunzel, I assume) as food and the semi-sweet chips (Sunspire, I assume) as taxable food. That is very, very weird.

Sales tax laws differ by state. The Texas Administrative Code explains the following:

"Food and food ingredients include food products intended for human consumption, such as the following: ... cocoa and cocoa products ...."

"Food products do not include ... candy;"

"Candy--A confection made of natural or artificial sweeteners and includes ... chocolate .... The term does not include products used exclusively for cooking, such as chocolate bits and cake sprinkles."

"Food and food ingredients are exempt from sales tax unless otherwise taxable under subsection (c) of this section." Subsection (c) says that candy is taxable.

So is one somehow candy and the other food?

Here's another bizarre difference. The Rapunzel chips have a serving size of 40 grams and the Sunspire chips have a serving size of 15 grams. As if the former is a food and the latter is candy. This makes it difficult to compare the nutrients, too.

So then I compared ingredients. Both have sugar, soy lecithin and vanilla or vanilla beans, in that order, with all the cocoa ingredients listed between the sugar and soy lecithin. The cocoa ingredients are:
* Rapunzel - cocoa butter, chocolate liquor, chocolate powder
* Sunspire - unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter
According to Wikipedia, unsweetened chocolate and chocolate liquor are the same thing: "pure, ground, roasted chocolate beans." And cocoa powder is "made by pulverising partially defatted chocolate liquor and removing nearly all the cocoa butter." Meaning that although Rapunzel has more cocoa butter, they may have made up for it by adding extra cocoa that had the cocoa butter removed. Again, difficult to compare.

So I went back to the nutrition and did math so I could compare them properly. The Rapunzel has more fat and less sugar, and a hint more fiber, calcium, and iron.

Finally I opened both packages and tasted them. They both taste good.

Then I had R. taste them. He said the both taste mediocre, but that the Rapunzel tastes darker and better. (Note: he likes only extremely dark chocolate (85%), though does not yet like completely unsweetened chocolate. The Rapunzel is labelled as having merely 55% cocoa. The Sunspire is not labelled in this way.)

In conclusion, I am buying the Rapunzel from now on because they cost less both in price per ounce and in sales tax (unless there was a mistake at the register that gets fixed) and because they might taste a little better.

And after continued taste testing while proofreading, I now agree that the Rapunzel chips do taste better than the Sunspire because they taste less sweet. I might also prefer the flavor of their sugar which is less processed than usual and thus has a hint of molasses flavor to it (but probably not).