What Is Stevia? The Plant Sweetener in Your Chocolate

Stevia almost never works alone in a chocolate bar. On the ingredients list another sweetener nearly always comes first.

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 under post Brexit rules it applies in Northern Ireland but not in Great Britain.

Our guide to sugar alcohols and how they appear on labels covers the other big sweetener family you will meet on packs.

Why does chocolate blend stevia with another sweetener?

Sugar does two separate jobs in a chocolate bar. It makes the bar sweet. It also 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. A bar made with that little powder would have a large hole in the recipe 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, while stevia, at two hundredths of one percent, lifts the sweetness. We cover the maltitol side in its own guide to what maltitol is and how it behaves in chocolate.

Which Diablo products contain stevia?

We use stevia in both of our ranges, in products as far apart as the 80% Dark Chocolate bar and the Gummy Bears.

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. Stevia is in both products, so the sweetener tells you nothing about which claim a pack carries. 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?

The two countries regulate it in different ways. Great Britain runs a permitted additives list, so purified steviol glycosides carry an E number and appear on the government register above.

In the United States the FDA has assessed high purity steviol glycoside preparations, at least 95 percent pure. It 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."

Is stevia safe to eat?

In 2010 the European Food Safety Authority reviewed the toxicology on purified stevia and concluded that steviol glycosides meeting the international purity specification "are not carcinogenic, genotoxic or associated with any reproductive/developmental toxicity". Genotoxic means damaging to DNA.

The same opinion set an acceptable daily intake of 4 mg per kg of body weight per day, expressed as steviol equivalents. That is the amount a person could take in every day for a lifetime without appreciable risk. EFSA fixed it 100 times below the highest intake that showed no adverse effect in a two year feeding study in rats. For a 60 kg adult it comes to 240 mg a day.

Steviol equivalents count only the steviol core of each molecule and leave out the glucose units attached to it. Our 80% dark bar declares its steviol glycosides at 0.02 percent, which is 15 mg in a 75 g bar. That 0.02 percent is the glycoside weight as declared on the pack, which is why it sits in brackets inside the sweetener entry on the ingredients list.

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. 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.

Is stevia bad for you?

No. The European Food Safety Authority found purified steviol glycosides to be neither genotoxic nor carcinogenic and set an acceptable daily intake of 4 mg per kg of body weight per day, expressed as steviol equivalents. Our 80% dark bar declares it at 0.02 percent of the recipe.

See the chocolate bar range