Take a stand for true chocolate  

Sadly many of the “Chocolate Covered Strawberries” you see online are not made with real milk, white or dark (semi-sweet) chocolate.  

A hole in the FDA regulations allows companies to use many similar phrases to disguise that something is not truly milk, white or semi-sweet chocolate.

The simplest form of the rules regarding chocolate is that you can’t call something Milk Chocolate, White Chocolate or Semi-Sweet (Dark) Chocolate unless there is cocoa butter in it. The actual rules get a bit complicated, use very technical language, listing percentages, allowed ingredients, and that only the products that meet all the rules can be called those names. When specific ingredients are left out or replaced with something else other names must be used. 

The loophole in the Standard of Identity, for the various types of chocolate, is that it only comes into play when it is the whole phrase ”Milk Chocolate”, “Milk Chocolate” or “Semi-Sweet Chocolate”. You can call things "White" or "Dark" all day long and not get into trouble. You’ll notice that “Milk” is not listed in the previous sentence, “Milk” has its own standard of identity (it come from cows, and the technical definition is not that appetizing).  

What needs to happen?
For the confectionery industry or when anything is supposedly dipped, dunked, or covered in a substance that looks like chocolate, then the standalone terms white, milk and dark also need protected and allowed only when true chocolate is used.  (it’s time to get “dark” in there as the common name for the semi-sweet/ bitter-sweet as well). 

New common names need created to cover when something is made without cocoa butter keeping them separate from the true chocolate so there is no overlap in official naming. The overlap and unregulated common names (Milk, White, and Dark) allows companies to play the system, and while staying inside the current rules, deceive the public.  

Standards of Identity are meant to protect the public, but these standards have some huge holes in them and people are being misled.  

While the FDA writes the rules, the FTC has to enforce them. Even with the many types of problems in the industry the FTC has yet to have any public actions.  

No one has taken a stand, the FDA & FTC have failed the public and the consumer is not being protected from deceptive marketing and labeling.

 As an example of what is happening at some of the major companies in the “chocolate covered strawberry” industry:
Imagine you walk into a mall and search the electronic kiosk to find “white chocolate covered strawberries”, the kiosk shows you many pretty pictures and directs you to a store. The store has a long entry hall, and there are posters about the health benefits of chocolate, reviews from people talking about white chocolate covered strawberries, you look to the ceiling and even see there is a department called White Chocolate. You get to the actual product displays and you don’t notice that the word chocolate is nowhere to be found, after all you followed all the signs to get white chocolate covered strawberries, so the product must be that.. right? (Nope, you got swizzled)  

The companies behind this deception are experts at all forms of rule bending, and have never dipped in true milk chocolate, white chocolate or semi-sweet (dark) chocolate.

The store in the mall analogy is more realistic than most people would believe, all the way from paid ads for the keywords you search for, to stories on the health benefits of chocolate on the home page, to category names coming up for products they don’t actually make with ingredients they don’t use.

How they get around the regulations:
When you look at their products web pages you’ll never see the phrases Milk Chocolate, White Chocolate or Semi-Sweet Chocolate, nor will you see the phase “chocolate covered strawberries”, but just because you don’t see them does not mean that they are not there. The words are hidden throughout the code that makes the web page.  For the tech savvy just look at the source code, titles, Meta-data, alts, menu names and the rest.  

Why does the hidden data matter? Simply because the search engines (Like Google & Bing) look at all the hidden parts of the page to classify what the pages and sites are about.  The search engines also see all the sites that link to that site. Those other sites (and some of them are paid) don’t know the legal requirements to call something chocolate or any of the regulated terms, so they are loaded with technically inaccurate descriptions.

The fake chocolate strawberry companies want to get ranked high so you see them first in a search.  

Have you gotten fooled by them before? Don’t feel bad, at one time even Oprah got fooled and became a shill for these companies.

You’ve heard talk show radio hosts push these companies, they accept money for those endorsements. Most radio shows would push any product for the right amount of money.

Think you know who they are yet? Don’t bet on it, they operate under many different names.

Why all the company names?
While originally it was probably to separate out dissimilar product lines, eventually they ran into the posting rules for places like the ad serving network at Google.

Google has a simple rule: only one paid ad from the same company on a page. That rule was put in place to prevent a single company from dominating the paid search results. The problem with that rule is that the companies that want to get around it simply pull another business license, and put a new skin on the web site.  Do this a few times and like magic they can now dominate the paid and unpaid search results whenever they want. They have been doing it for a long time.  

At one time our competitors actually had an ingredients label that listed “Milk Chocolate”, “White Chocolate” and “Dark Chocolate”, but the ingredients listed didn’t actually match those regulated terms.  Even with all the deception in the industry: no government action was taken, no recalls, no mass customer refunds.  

Still don’t think there is a problem in the industry regarding the use of Milk, White and Dark in the confectionery industry? Next time Easter rolls around head to a drug store and take a close look at those bunnies. Many will use the non-regulated terms on the front of the packaging, true chocolate boxes will be mixed in with the flavored and things that can’t legally be called chocolate at all.  And sometimes,because of packaging constraints or to make a consistent packaging look you may only see "Milk", "White" or "Dark" on the front but true chocolate in the ingredients on the back.

The standards of identity for milk, white and dark chocolate need fixed, the common names need to be included to protect the public from deception.

How you can you help?
Get the word out, tell people, if you are buying online ask for an ingredients list, when you find a company with a deceptive site don't let them get away with it.