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Ritter Sport Chocolates (symbolic picture): New variety sweetened with cocoa juice instead of sugar
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Alexander Blum / dpa
There is a new variety from Ritter Sport: in the familiar square format and with lots of cocoa.
But the chocolate manufacturer's latest creation cannot be called chocolate in Germany.
Strictly speaking, anyway.
The reason: the local food law.
According to the German regulation on cocoa and chocolate products from 2003, chocolate does not only consist of ingredients such as cocoa mass, cocoa powder and cocoa butter, but also of sugar.
But this sugar is missing in the new Ritter Sport product with the name Cacao y Nada (cocoa and nothing).
For sweetening, the company from Waldenbuch near Stuttgart uses natural cocoa juice instead, which it extracts from cocoa pods on a plantation in Nicaragua.
From a legal point of view, however, the chocolate bar is no longer chocolate.
But that's not all: The Cocoa Ordinance is a kind of statutory recipe book - anyone who violates it risks fines and, in extreme cases, an officially prescribed sales ban.
"Cocoa fruit bar" instead of chocolate
Ritter Sport is now complaining that German food law is no longer up to date on this point.
The fact that a chocolate that consists entirely of cocoa and does not require the addition of sugar should not be called such in this country is "absurd," said company boss Andreas Ronken.
“If sausage can be made from peas, chocolate doesn't need sugar either.
Wake up! ”A Ritter Sport spokeswoman said that they were advocating a change to the regulation.
Nevertheless, the company now wants to bring its new product to the German market, just not as “chocolate”, but for example under the label “cocoa fruit bar”.
It remains to be seen whether this will affect sales.
The company had to cope with declines in sales in the past two years, and in 2020 with its 1,650 employees achieved sales of 470 million euros.
Fortunately, Alfred Ritter KG is on the market in more than a hundred other countries - the depths of local food law are unlikely to affect chocolate there.
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apr / dpa
