I thought I was pretty up to date with all the kinds of chocolate that I knew, but this Van Houten bar has presented me with something I don’t think I’ve seen before. On the package it claims to be “dark milk” chocolate. I was always under the impression that dark chocolate and milk chocolate were two different things. I thought that there was some kind of percentage of cocoa that when crossed made your chocolate either dark or milk. I think what they’re trying to say with the words dark milk chocolate is that it’s on the more cocoa end of milk chocolate. I think it’s always nice to have plenty of cocoa, so I guess that’s a good thing.

The nice quality chocolate and tasty almonds could have made this an above average chocolate bar, except two things take it down just a bit. Both of the problems were apparent right off the bat, and while neither ruined the bar, it did lose a few points in my book. The first thing I noticed about this chocolate bar was that it was made with full almonds. I like this, however the problem is that the distribution of almonds wasn’t even close to even. I had almost all of the almonds on one side of my bar, with two on the other. Between these clusters of almonds was no almonds at all. The other problem I noticed was that this bar was very flaky. What I mean by this is that the package holding my bar had many slivers of broken chocolate in it, more than what I see with most chocolate bars. It wasn’t an issue with melting, it was as if the chocolate was slowly being chipped away.

The portions of this bar that were intact (which was most of it) and the portions with almonds (which was about half of it) were great. Even the portions without almonds were tasty. It’s a perfectly fine chocolate bar, and I enjoyed the extra cocoa. I just feel like there’s a few issues with the way this bar was manufactured that turns what could be a great bar into an average bar.