Let me get the awkward part out of the way. The single highest-scoring bar of the 2026 European Bean-to-Bar competition — higher than every dark bar, every heroic 100% slab, every serious-faced single origin in the room — is a white chocolate with flowers in it.

Sometimes you unwrap a bar and it's wrong. A pale, dusty, greyish film has crept across the surface, the gloss is gone, and it looks faintly stale. It's called bloom — a lovely word for something so disappointing — and it's one of the most common questions we're asked.

There is a convention in craft chocolate that goes largely unspoken but is observed almost universally. Dark bars are serious. Milk chocolate is not.