A Brief History Of White Chocolate—And Our Taste Tests!

White chocolate is much like regular chocolate with one major difference—it lacks the cocoa solids that give chocolate that, well, chocolate color. White chocolate still has cocoa butter, milk solids and sugar . . . which provide that pleasant mouthfeel.

To be called white chocolate, according to the Food and Drug administration, chocolate must have at least 20% cocoa butter. There’s no requirement that white chocolate have any cacao nibs, however. (The nibs have the distinctive chocolate taste and fragrance).

Leaving aside the endless debate of whether white chocolate is really chocolate, let’s look at the history of this confection.

According to the Washington Post, white chocolate’s first commercial production is credited to Nestle in 1936 in Switzerland. “The story is that it was a way to use up excess milk powder that had been produced for troops in World War I and was no longer in demand.”

To find the best white chocolate, we did blind taste tests (sure, a tough job, but someone had to do it). We looked at a wide spectrum of white chocolate to find the best bets in several areas. Here are the winners:

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