You’re standing in the supermarket with a bar of milk chocolate in your hand. The front says “sugar-free” in big letters. You turn it over and the nutrition panel lists sugars. So who got it wrong?

Nobody, as it happens. Those two words on the wrapper just don’t mean what most of us assume.

“Sugar-free” and “no added sugars” are not the same thing

EU rules are strict here. “Sugars-free” may only appear on a food with no more than 0.5 g of sugars per 100 g. “No added sugars” means the manufacturer hasn’t added any sugar – but the sugars that occur naturally in the ingredients stay put: lactose in milk, fructose and glucose in fruit.

Milk chocolate is a special case. Milk contains its own sugar, so a milk chocolate that is genuinely “sugars-free” is rare. Most of what you see is chocolate with no added sugars, sweetened with something else.

What sugar-free chocolate is sweetened with

You’ll usually come across three sweeteners:

• Maltitol. A sugar alcohol made from starch. It tastes close to sugar, has around 2.4 kcal per gram instead of 4, and behaves much like sugar in chocolate – which is why chocolatiers use it most. In larger amounts it can have a laxative effect; if a product contains more than 10% of it, the label has to say so.
• Erythritol. Another sugar alcohol, almost calorie-free, with a slightly cooling aftertaste.
• Stevia. A sweetener from the leaves of a South American plant. Many times sweeter than sugar, with a typical bitter note, so it’s usually blended with another sweetener.

They’re often joined by fibre such as chicory inulin, which gives the chocolate body.

What to check on the label

Three things are enough:

1. The “of which sugars” line in the nutrition panel. That’s where the truth about sugar lives, whatever the front of the pack says.
2. The ingredients list. Cocoa and milk should come first, not the sweetener.
3. The cocoa content. The more cocoa, the less room there is for everything else.

Why gfBar COCONUT has white chocolate

Three of our flavours are coated in dark chocolate made from 100% cocoa. But coconut and wild blueberries call for something gentle rather than bitter. That’s why COCONUT is the only flavour with a white coating.

We use Felchlin Alba 36%, a white chocolate from the Swiss chocolate maker Felchlin, sweetened with maltitol. It contains cocoa butter, milk powder and soy lecithin, so COCONUT is not vegan. Maltitol makes up about 9% of the whole bar.

And sugar? We don’t add any to COCONUT. Even so, the nutrition panel shows 37 g of sugars per 100 g. They come from the wild blueberries, dates and coconut the bar is made from, and from the milk in the coating. That’s why the pack says “no added sugars” rather than “sugar-free”. Less catchy, but true.

Curious how coconut, blueberries and white chocolate get on together? Find gfBar COCONUT here.