The Chocolate Showdown

When I tell people that after three years of living in Portugal - the country of sun, green wine, and beautiful beaches - I moved to Belgium - the country whose name in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is described as the rudest word in the whole of Universe - I always get the same reaction: Why (the hell) would you do that? people ask (and sometimes, after several consecutive months of endless rain, so do I). Well, the truth is I moved to Belgium because of love (enter The Notebook soundtrack). Yes, I know I know, I'm unoriginal, and yes, some anti-Beyoncé will one day write an anti-women's anthem about people like me, but after 2.5 years I have come to call this place home. A temporary home, maybe, but a home nonetheless. Like an inflatable mattress.

Now, these days, when people ask me, "So, what's good in Belgium?" I formulate my answer based on my 2.5 years of experience in the country. Usually, my thoughts turn to food and fictional characters: Belgium. The country of waffles and French fries (yes, French fries – poor Belgium).

The country of highly alcoholic beer (also cherry beer that even non-beer lovers like because it's nothing like beer), Tintin (that straight white guy with the cute little dog), the city of Bruges (neither food, nor a fictional character), great chocolate (great it is), and Hercule Poirot.

But let’s get back to the chocolate. For the longest time, I wanted to write a blog post about my experiences visiting different chocolate shops in Brussels, tasting and comparing the chocolates, and taking notes. Well, that blog post never happened because I just ended up buying a bunch of chocolates, eating most of them right away, taking pictures of myself holding the chocolates that had manage to escape my binge eating and that looked like each other's long lost twin brothers, and jotting down notes such as "flavorful," "crunchy," or "meh," which, despite their apparent food-writerly brilliance, would probably not have made Anthony Bourdain shake in his des(s)ert boots. But even though the blog post never happened, that experience introduced me to Belgian chocolate, and I must say that although everybody claims Belgian chocolate is great, I take a little bit of an issue with that (What? Oh, the blasphemy!). Not because the chocolate is not great (oh, phew), but rather, when is chocolate not great? Isn't it like chocolate’s inherent quality to be great? Have you ever had bad chocolate?

In my opinion, however, there’s a greater chocolate than Belgian chocolate (don't cast your stones just yet, okay?), and it was this realization that set me out on my journey to find out for once and for all which chocolate is the best. (For the record, I'm aware that, as I'm living and writing this in Belgium, these might be the very last words that I utter. But what wouldn't I do in the name of science?).

So... what can be better than Belgian chocolate?

Well, let me first tell you what it's not - it's not French chocolate, it's not Swiss chocolate, or any other chocolate that you are probably thinking of. Nor is it the OG of all chocolates. Actually, when I told my Mexican fiancé that I was writing this post, we had this delightful exchange:


Fiancé: “Do you know where the original chocolate is from?”

Me: “Let me guess… Mexico?”

Fiancé: “Mexico. Honey, I think you should-”

Me: “No.”


So, like I said, it's not Mexican chocolate either and, unfortunately (she said, not gloatingly at all), I had no access to said chocolate, so my fiancé gets to keep his illusion of the superiority of his country's pride and joy.

Anyway, the chocolate that I feel has always deserved the status of the best chocolate, the dark horse, the Rocky (but not rocky road) of all chocolates is (drumroll, please)...

FINNISH CHOCOLATE!


[Cue the crickets.]

Now, you might or might not know that I'm from Finland and you might or might not think that I’m a little biased and only claiming that Finnish chocolate is the best because in some sick and twisted way that feeds my nationalist pride. Well, rest assured that I’ve lived outside of Finland long enough not to let my judgement be (too) clouded by the big old Finnish cloud of Moomin trolls. My taste buds, however, are a different story altogether. Someone wise has said that your preferences are formed in your childhood and I don’t know for sure but I have a feeling that my taste buds are nothing but a bunch of prejudiced nationalist assholes. That’s why, in order to pass the throne of the Best Chocolate to its rightful owner, I decided to do a little test.

The Test

The crime scene: An international event in Liège, Belgium.

Testers: A crowd of people of 16 different nationalities* to ensure unbiased taste buds.

Contenders: To make this competition at least somewhat fair (to Belgium), I paired the Finnish chocolate and candy giant Fazer with two (2!) of Belgium’s chocolate brands – Galler and Côte d’Or. After the fact I heard that Côte d'Or has actually been bought by an American company, but oh well, the damage, at that point, had already been done. (By the way, none of these brands are paying me anything for this free exposure, but if they are reading this - which I'm sure they are... not -, they should obviously pay me in chocolate.)

In Finland’s corner, we’ve got these two beauties:

Fazer: Milk chocolate

Fazer: Milk chocolate with salty toffee crunch

By the way: Finns, if you’re reading this and wondering what these white stickers on the packaging are, they’re there because the chocolates were bought in Brussels at the only place that I’m aware of that sells Finnish goodies – the Finnish Seamen’s Church (Yes, ‘Seamen’. Oh, grow up, you immature person you!) – and they needed to have the product description in both French and Dutch.

In Belgium’s corner, there are these two solid options:

Galler: 'LAIT Profond' milk chocolate

Côte d'Or: 'Bloc' caramelized almonds with a pinch of salt

The two milk chocolates (Fazer and Galler) and the two ‘exotic’ milk chocolates (Fazer's salty toffee crunch and Côte d'Or's Bloc) will go head to head (by the way, I called the latter 'exotic' so as not to steer the testers' opinions in any particular way). However, it should be noted that the two exotic chocolates are unfortunately not 100 percent comparable as Côte d'Or's Bloc has almonds, whereas Fazer's version does not. Obviously, my intention was to find a salted caramel(ish) version of both the chocolates, and after four stores and an hour of chocolate tasting (I know, my life is hard), this is the closest I could get.

Test Setup

The testing day was cold and rainy (what else is new, Belgium?). At home, my fiancé helped me break the rivaling chocolates down into smaller pieces (some more cooperatively than others) and when we arrived at the testing place, we placed them in the little containers shown below. The milk chocolate (Finnish chocolate in cup A and Belgian in cup B) is on the left-hand side of the picture and the ‘exotic' milk chocolate (Finnish chocolate in container A and Belgian in container B) is on the right. The testers were asked to taste these chocolates and choose their preference (A or B). They were not told the origin of the chocolate, and even if they chose B (the Belgian option), I kept my cool and only judged them on the inside.

Curiously enough, it wasn't too hard to get people to participate in the chocolate test (I know, crazy, right?). Most were eager to participate, and in the end, thirty-six people took part in the test, out of whom one participant only tried the milk chocolates and couldn’t decide between the two options and one participant didn’t quite care for either of the exotic chocolates. The rest of the participants tried and evaluated them all.

Nationality had some effect. For example, all Italians (except for one rebel) were unanimous about the superiority of the Finnish chocolate (yay... I mean, I'm completely impartial). Also, both the Mexicans answered the same way (4 points go to... Finland!), but then again, there were only two of them. FUN FACT: Most Belgian participants preferred the Finnish option in both cases. Yeah, I mean, I know this was a blind test and all but… where is your national pride, Belgians?

So, who won?

Before the testing day, I crafted the diagram below to help me evaluate the results as fairly as possible. As you can see, there's a column for nationality, two to mark your preference, and one for any comments that the participants might have.

As it turns out, surprisingly many people used the comment section. Here are some problems that the comments highlighted:

- As explained before, the salty caramel(ish) chocolate option wasn’t identical for both countries as the Côte d’Or version had almonds. This might very well have affected the results.
- No water to cleanse the palate with. (Moreover – even though nobody mentioned it – we have to take into account the fact that the test was set up at a bar, so different drinks might have affected taste buds in different ways.)
- We had no dark chocolate, which I was told is the thing that Belgians are the most famous for.
- Belgians were our biggest group of testers, whereas there were no Finns -> potential for bias

Each selection of A or B gained one point for the corresponding chocolate. So, whenever a tester would mark A as their preference, that was one point for Finland, and whenever they marked B, Belgium gained one point. After counting all the points, these are the results I got:

	Finland (A)	Belgium (B)
Milk chocolate	21	15
‘Exotic’ milk chocolate	22	11

Now, if we only look at the numbers and disregard all other factors, we have a clear winner.

But wait! Hold up!

Because of the margin of errors and the small number of participants, I wanted to make sure that the results were not just a coincidence. Since, unfortunately, I live up to the stereotype of writers not being good with numbers, I asked my fiancé, who is a physicist (ergo, good with numbers), to create the below diagram. Of which I understand nothing at all, but hey, it looks impressive!

Anyway, what my fiancé explained is that basically it is hard to rule out the possibility of a random result especially in the case of the milk chocolates (the exotic chocolates were a little bit further apart, but randomness cannot be ruled out in that case either).

So, because of the above diagram and because I simply cannot deal with a crying chocolate bar (and because this is my blog after all and not a scientific journal), I will apply the "they all lived happily ever after" approach which means that we will call it…

A TIE!

Hurrah! Long live Belgium! Long live Finland! And long live chocolate!

Closing words

Many thanks first of all to my fiancé for all his help, to everybody who so kindly volunteered to recruit participants for me when I was too shy to ask myself, and, of course, to all the testers who volunteered for this "study." I hope you had as fun as I did!

*Belgian, French, Turkish, German (and German-Kurdish), British, Argentinian, Russian, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Mexican, Egyptian, Colombian, Lithuanian, Iranian