I’ve never been a huge Mars bar fan. They were always incredibly sweet and almost too sickly to get through and yet were most likely the favoured choccy bar of many a burly bloke and busy tradie. Washed down with a can of coke too of course.
Mars have been selling these in Australia since 1954, so they’ve certainly taken their time in trying their hand at a darker chocolate. However, seeing the Limited Edition dark version at my corner shop was too tempting to ignore. Maybe I’ve been living a sheltered life, but I haven’t seen any advertisements for them anywhere.
The bars are now 53 grams in size instead of 60 grams to reduce the calorific intake to less than 250. In a magazine advert from July 2009, Peter West, General Manager of Mars Snackfood Australia, said, “We know that our products are never going to be as healthy as a piece of fruit, but we also recognise that our consumers have become increasingly concerned about the nutritional content and portion size they eat.”
Fair enough. Back to the Mars Dark. This ’dark’ chocolate only contains 38% cocoa solids, and when you consider that Haigh’s and Lindt’s milk chocolates contain around 31-32% cocoa solids, it makes me wonder just how Mars get it to look so dark. There’s no answers here, but it is a bit of relief that they’re not relying on any artificial colours or flavours.
And it tastes great actually. Soft, smooth and eye-bulgingly sweet, just the way Mars Bar aficionados like them. The dark chocolate flavour is very evident and it works somehow because there’s a really distinct, cocoa-powder flavour that hits the palate before the caramel and nougat sends the taste buds into a sugar high. Love Chunks tried the second bar over our cups of freshly-ground and brewed morning coffee (NO WAY was coke going to enter the picture) and thought that it was OK but that he still preferred the usual milk chocolate version.
This bar contains 10.1 grams of fat (14% of your daily allowance), of which 6.1 is saturated. I’d happily eat this again except that the list of ingredients also unfortunately reveals that it contains the dreaded vegetable fat. Unless Mars contacts me and explains otherwise, (and I’ll happily publish a retraction) I’m going to assume that the vaguely-named ‘vegetable fat’ is in fact palm oil.
Come on Mars, go all the way - you’re concerned about portion sizes and reducing artificial colourings and flavours, so how about getting rid of environmentally-catastrophic palm oil as well?
Unfortunately it seems that most of the mass-produced chocolate/candy bars out there use vegetable fat – and this makes me avoid them on the whole too, as it does seem a tad suspicious that they’re so vague about it.
And really, 38%? That really couldn’t ever count as dark! (Dismounts high horse.)
(gets on high horse – oh look! the saddle’s still warm from Hannah’s butt!)
I agree – in no way, shape or form can 38% ever be considered dark. I call shenanigans!
Mars bars are somehting I eat very rarely, like you said, they’re just too sweet. Even when I do have one, I eat half and have the other half the next day. I haven’t yet tried the dark version, but I will eventually. Next time Coles has bars for half price probably.
When they put a generic descriptor like that it usually means that tehy use different oils depending on what’s cheap/available and is often a blend of different stuff. It saves them changing the labels every time that commodity prices move. But given that palm oil is usually among the cheapest oils it’s probably in there some where.
That High Horse can clearly accommodate more than onen of us, because I’m with you all – surely 40% should be the bare minimum for ‘dark’ chocolate?
River, eating half a Mars Bar one day and the other half the next day is my idea of a strict diet!
Anabels, you are quite right. There has, however, been a huge lot of publicity about the ubiquitous palm oil here in Australia, with calls from concerned consumers for the government to make it mandatory to specify what kind of vegetable oil or fat a food contains. After all, if products can now have the all-covering ‘may contain nuts or have been processed on machinery that processed nuts’ then they can surely say ‘vegetable oil may contain palm oil’.
*laughs* Maybe we should call it the Elongated Horse? And honestly, I’m even skeptical of 40%!