What Is Stevia? The Plant Sweetener in Your Chocolate

Stevia almost never works alone in a chocolate bar, which is the part of the story most labels leave you to work out for yourself.

What are steviol glycosides?

Stevia comes from a shrub in the daisy family, native to Paraguay and Brazil. The sweetness sits in a group of molecules in its leaves called steviol glycosides, best known among them stevioside and rebaudioside A, shortened to Reb A on technical sheets.

The dried leaves are steeped in water, the sweet compounds separated out, then the extract purified until it is almost entirely steviol glycosides. What reaches a chocolate factory is a fine white powder, not a green leaf. The US Food and Drug Administration describes the material it has assessed as preparations of at least 95 percent purity.

What does E960 mean on a UK ingredients list?

In Great Britain stevia is an approved food additive, so it carries an E number. The government list splits it into separate entries depending on how the glycosides are produced:

The same list carries a fourth entry, E960d, for glucosylated steviol glycosides. It was authorised by the European Commission, so it applies in Northern Ireland but not in Great Britain. That is a small quirk of post Brexit food law which catches a lot of label readers out.

If you want the wider picture of how sweeteners are named on packs, our guide to sugar alcohols and how they appear on labels covers the other big family you will meet.

Why does chocolate blend stevia with another sweetener?

Sugar does two separate jobs in a chocolate bar. It makes the bar sweet, and it makes up a large share of the bar by weight, which is what gives chocolate its body, its snap and the way it melts.

Steviol glycosides handle the first job at a fraction of a percent and cannot touch the second. Take that much powder and you have a recipe with a large hole in it where the sugar used to be. So a bar is built with a bulk sweetener that fills the space and behaves like sugar in the tempering tank, with stevia added on top to lift the sweetness.

In our own 80 percent dark bar the ingredients list reads sweetener (maltitol and steviol glycosides (0.02%)). Maltitol carries the bulk and the melt. Stevia contributes at two hundredths of one percent. If you have ever wondered why a bar sold on stevia still lists something else first, that is the reason. Our separate guide to what maltitol is and how it behaves in chocolate covers the bulk half of the partnership.

Which Diablo products contain stevia?

Two very different examples, one from each of our ranges: the 80% Dark Chocolate bar and the Gummy Bears. Reading them side by side is the quickest way to see how stevia gets used in practice.

The bar sits in our No Added Sugar range, which means no sugar is added during making. It contains naturally occurring sugars from the cocoa itself, which is where the 1.1 g per 100 g comes from. The gummies sit in the Sugar Free range, where the finished sweet holds under 0.5 g of sugars per 100 g. Two different claims with two different thresholds, and stevia turns up in both. In the gummies the steviol glycosides sit at the very end of the list, after the maltitol, the sorbitol, the starch and the fruit concentrates.

Is stevia treated the same way in the UK and the US?

Not quite, and the difference is worth knowing if you buy from both sides of the Atlantic. Great Britain runs a permitted additives list, so purified steviol glycosides carry an E number and appear on the government register above.

The United States runs a different system. The FDA has assessed high purity steviol glycoside preparations, at least 95 percent pure, and states that it "has not questioned the notifiers' GRAS conclusions for these high-purity stevia derived sweeteners". Whole leaves and crude extracts are treated separately: "The use of stevia leaf and crude stevia extracts is not considered GRAS, and their import into the U.S. is not permitted for use as sweeteners."

So the plant on a windowsill and the powder in a factory are not interchangeable in law, on either side of the Atlantic.

Frequently asked questions

Does stevia have any calories?

Steviol glycosides provide sweetness without calories. Because they are used at fractions of a percent, they contribute nothing meaningful to the energy value of a finished product. The calories in a chocolate bar or a bag of gummies come from the cocoa butter, the milk solids, the starches and the bulk sweetener, not from the stevia.

Why is stevia listed at the end of an ingredients list?

Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight, and steviol glycosides are used at fractions of a percent, so they tend to fall near the bottom. In our Gummy Bears they are the final ingredient on the list. In our 80 percent dark bar they are declared inside the compound sweetener instead, in brackets after the maltitol they are blended with.

Is stevia the same as the stevia plant sold at a garden centre?

They share a species, Stevia rebaudiana, but not a legal status. Food manufacturers use a purified extract of the leaf, which Great Britain lists as E960a to E960c and which the FDA has assessed at 95 percent purity or above. Whole leaves and crude extracts are not permitted as sweeteners in the United States.

See the chocolate bar range