Despite being the newest trend in chocolate, I find the name functional chocolate absolutely horrible. It suggests you can do something with it besides eat it — hammer a nail into the wall, say, or feed the fish in your aquarium. (Don't. It's a terrible idea, and the fish will not thank you.) But it is what it is, the name is already established on the market, and so, as the song says — let it be.

So let's get on the same page about what the wretched name actually means, because it covers a lot of ground.

At the mild, sensible end, functional can be as simple as what the sugar is. Swap the regular white stuff for coconut sugar — lower on the glycaemic index, carrying a little cargo of minerals — and congratulations, technically your chocolate now has a function. (Whether coconut sugar deserves its health halo is a genuinely interesting rabbit hole, and one I'm saving for its own email, because if I start now we'll be here until Tuesday.)

Keep walking toward the deep end and things get more ambitious. Fibre. Probiotics — yes, the yogurt bacteria, now moonlighting in chocolate. And then, right at the far weird edge where the water gets cold and the fish look at you funny, the fungi: lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, the whole medicinal-mushroom cast that the wellness world has decided is the future of feeling slightly more capable on a Thursday afternoon.

Now, a word of restraint, because I like you and I don't want us both getting letters. I am not going to promise you that any of this will sharpen your memory, calm your nerves, or help you finally remember where you put the good scissors. The science on functional mushrooms is real but young, the studies are ongoing, and anyone selling you certainty is selling you something. What I can promise is that the chocolate is good — which, when you think about it, is the only honest reason to eat chocolate in the first place.

Which brings me to the Czechs.

You already know Prague Chocolate — Steiner & Kovařík — because they're the delightful lunatics who put asparagus into white chocolate, entered it in the world's most serious chocolate competition, and won gold. That bar sits at #3 in our Top 100 and has an unlikely devoted following, as does their oyster-mushroom white, proof that "that shouldn't work" and "I can't stop eating this" are not mutually exclusive. This is not a wellness brand that stumbled into chocolate. It's a two-decade bean-to-bar obsession that happens to have a sense of humour.

And they've been busy. At this year's International Chocolate Awards for Europe, the Middle East & Africa, they collected six awards — including a silver for their Aluna 100% (which placed third overall in the entire 100% single-origin category) and a bronze, on its very first outing, for a new dark chocolate with beetroot and blackcurrant. When a house this playful also keeps winning medals, you stop calling it luck.

The new arrival is the reason we're here: their Aluna line. The beans are single-origin Colombian, grown on the Suárez family farm — no vague "sustainably sourced" hand-waving, an actual family with an actual farm. They're sweetened throughout with coconut sugar. And the functional headliner is the Aluna 60% with Hericium — that's lion's mane, milled in at a serious 12%, and developed not in a marketing meeting but through a research project with two Czech technical universities. You brace for earth and medicine. What arrives instead is fruit — cherry, cranberry, dark berries — and a deep, wine-like finish that genuinely recalls port, with the mushroom folded underneath as a soft, savoury note that rounds everything out rather than shouting. It hasn't won a medal yet — it's too new and too strange for the judges to have caught up — which is exactly why I'd get to it before they do.

The rest of the line has something for every stripe of health-conscious eater: the medal-winning 100% for the purists, a 77% single-origin dark, a 50% with no added sugar (sweetened, cleverly, with dates and banana), an all-organic 44% milk made with coconut sugar for the gentler palate, and the lion's mane bar for the genuinely curious.

Here's the arrangement. The Aluna line is on pre-order, and I've set a subscriber-only price — because asking you to order now and wait deserves a little sweetening. The subscriber price is not permanent. When the line lands publicly, it goes up.

And it ships after September, not before. This isn't us being slow — it's the one non-negotiable of shipping real chocolate through a heatwave. Coconut-sugar bars are a little hardier than most, but "a little hardier" is not a promise I'm willing to make to a courier's van in August. You've waited this long for a good bar; a few more weeks, and it arrives as the maker intended rather than as a rustic puddle. We care more about the chocolate you open than the date it leaves here.

Functional chocolate. Terrible name. Very good chocolate. Let it be.

Reserve the Aluna line →