This Dark Chocolate Bar Was Declared the Best in the World

Valentine’s Day is almost here, and no matter how you feel about the holiday, it’s an excellent excuse to enjoy some dark chocolate. If you’re searching for the absolute best bar —  either for your loved one or yourself — look no further than the treat that was declared the best dark chocolate in the world, according to the 2024 International Chocolate Awards: Norwegian chocolate maker Vigdis Rosenkilde’s 70% cacao Quellouno bar.

Simplicity is the key to this winner’s success. Roskenkilde’s 70% Quellouno is made from just two ingredients — sugar and cacao. The latter is sourced from a single-family farm in the Quelloúno district of Cusco, Peru, a region that gives the chocolate both its name and distinct flavor. The result is a bar with a complex profile, including tasting notes of forest berries, pecans, cream, and port wine, along with hints of green apple, plums, vanilla, yellow melon, and banana.

What are the International Chocolate Awards?

This annual competition is administered by the United Kingdom-based International Institute of Chocolate Tasting (IICT), and seeks to find the absolute best chocolate in the world. More than 50 judges select regional winners who go on to compete for the international prizes, which are judged by a grand jury. In the end, there are four overall — or “best in competition” — winners and 44 more specific category prizes.

The best in competition prizes are awarded in some of the most competitive and broad groups, including plain dark chocolate bars, plain milk chocolate bars, flavored bars, and filled chocolates. The 44 additional prizes are given out in more niche categories, which can get as specific as the best “white chocolate enrobed whole fruit” or the separately awarded “white chocolate enrobed fruit pastes and jellies.” Suffice it to say all the chocolate bases are covered.

Judges grade entrants according to the IICT’s two flavor profile maps, which determine a chocolate’s positive qualities, such as herbal, spicy, fruity, dark, sweet, and vegetal tasting notes, and negative characteristics, like chemical, mineral, animal, and bacterial flavors. To ensure minimal bias and cleanse their palates, the judges even eat unseasoned, soupy polenta between taste tests.

During the 2024 award ceremony, culinary historian, award-winning chef, author, and co-founder of the International Chocolate Awards, Maricel Presilla emphasized that “This competition really shows the global face of cacao and chocolate, and also really focuses attention on the great farmers that are providing this excellent cacao to all of these extraordinary craft people all over.”

How was the best dark chocolate bar made?

Roskenkilde’s 70% Quellouno is crafted from Chuncho cacao, a highly coveted heirloom variety of the fruit that’s grown in Peru’s Urubamba Valley. These beans are cultivated at more than 5,000 feet above sea level, making them the highest-altitude variety of cacao. 

The chocolate maker sourced her Chuncho beans from the Paytiti farm. where one family has been cultivating cacao for three generations. The Paytiti family places importance on sustainably farming its crops, using regenerative methods of agriculture to help maintain natural biodiversity — this attention to the surrounding environment reflects the level of care that goes into preserving the heirloom fruit.

While Chuncho is one variety of cacao, this group can still be broken down further into different types of Chuncho beans. The award-winning bar from Rosenkilde is made from a few Chuncho types, all of which were picked in late February and early March of 2023.

Although this bar may seem simple to consumers, the steps that go into making chocolate are complex. After the cacao fruits have been harvested, farmers open the pods with a machete, remove the seeds and pulp, and extract the bean. Next, the beans are fermented for five to seven days in wooden boxes layered with banana leaves. After that, they’re dried for seven to 10 days, at first under partial sunlight, then under a plastic roof.

Once they’re dried, Roskenkilde roasts her Chuncho beans in a gas-powered drum roaster for around 30 minutes, and then they’re ground. This variety of bean is known for its complexity of flavor, so Roskenkilde likes to minimize the time that the beans are ground, to help preserve their integrity.

Finally the chocolate is conched, or kneaded with a mixing tool called a conche. The friction from this process generates heat, which melts the chocolate and creates the smooth texture you expect. For her prized chocolate, Roskenkilde processed the batch for 22 hours in a conche, then added sugar and poured the chocolate into molds, creating the final bar.

What makes this bar so special?

Rosenkilde — who splits her time between Norway and Peru — explains that like wine, there are a number of factors that can impact the final taste of chocolate besides just the type of cacao. Climate, soil composition, surrounding vegetation, ripeness of the fruit, tree age, and time of harvest can all contribute to a chocolate’s final flavor profile. That means that the 70% Quellouno bar will taste different from year to year, even if the core process for making it remains the same.

“My goal isn’t to make every batch taste identical, but to highlight the unique flavors that each harvest brings,” Rosenkilde tells Food & Wine. 

The flavor of chocolate can change in every step of its production, and the chocolate maker begins tasting from the very beginning when she’s sourcing cacao, sampling fresh pulp from the pods. She also experimented with three different roasting methods before deciding on the best one for this batch of Chuncho beans. “Unlike some batches where I specifically seek out floral notes like rose in Chuncho cacao, this time I wasn’t chasing a particular flavor profile,” Roskenkilde notes. “Instead, I let the cacao speak for itself.” 

The artisan even remembers the moment she realized she’d made a great chocolate, recalling to Food & Wine that, “I was tasting the first test batch, and as soon as it started melting on my tongue, I got a rush of bright berry flavors. I actually laughed because I loved it so much.”

Three other chocolates were declared the best of their kind

If you’re not a dark chocolate fan, the International Chocolate Awards gave top marks to a few other options you can try. The competition named a 54% bar from Venezuelan maker Delirio Chocolates as the best single-origin milk chocolate, and the top prize for a flavored chocolate bar was given to the Strawberry White offering from Canadian Kasama Chocolate. For anyone searching for something that isn’t in the shape of a bar, the best filled chocolate was a hazelnut and chocolate confection, the Giuinott from Italian maker Guido Castagna.