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What Is Inulin? The Chicory Fiber on a Chocolate Label
Inulin is a dietary fiber taken from chicory root. Your body cannot break it down, so it reaches the large intestine intact. In chocolate it adds fiber to the label and gives the bar body where sugar used to sit.
Both of these bars list inulin on the pack:
Dark Chocolate with Orange 75 g
8 g of fiber per 100 g
Milk Chocolate Bubble Bar 30 g
5.3 g of fiber per 100 g
What is inulin made from?
Nearly all the inulin used in food comes from chicory root, which stores its energy as inulin the way a potato stores it as starch. The fiber is drawn out of the root with hot water. Its chains are built from fructose units, which makes inulin a fructan.
The British and EU claim registers define native chicory inulin as a mixture with a mean degree of polymerization of 9 or more, meaning an average of at least nine linked units per chain.
What does inulin do in a chocolate bar?
Take sugar out of chocolate and you lose more than sweetness. Sugar is roughly half the weight of a normal bar, so something has to fill the gap or the chocolate turns thin and greasy. Inulin is one of the ingredients that fills it, which is how the fiber gets onto the label.
A study in the International Journal of Food Science and Technology tested inulin as a sucrose replacer in dark chocolate. Raising the inulin share increased viscosity and hardness, so the chocolate ran thicker when molten and set firmer, while its melting behavior barely moved.
In our bars inulin takes a back seat. The bulk sweetener is maltitol, with inulin behind it adding fiber and structure. On our Dark Chocolate with Orange it is the fifth of nine ingredients, after the maltitol, cocoa mass, cocoa butter and dried orange.
Maltitol has its own explainer: what maltitol is and how it sweetens.
How much fiber is in a no added sugar chocolate bar?
Our Dark Chocolate with Orange declares 8 g of fiber per 100 g and the Milk Chocolate Bubble Bar declares 5.3 g per 100 g.
Not all of that fiber is inulin. Cocoa carries fiber of its own and, in a dark bar, most of it.
On a Nutrition Facts panel the figures are per serving. The dark bar's serving is 25 g, which puts 2 g of fiber in a serving, 7 percent of the 28 g Daily Value the FDA sets for dietary fiber. The bubble bar's 30 g serving works out at 1.6 g, about 6 percent. No chocolate bar is going to carry your whole day of fiber on its own.
Both bars are No Added Sugar, a separate claim from Sugar Free with its own rules. They contain naturally occurring sugars: 2 g per 100 g in the dark bar from the cocoa and the dried orange; 9.8 g per 100 g in the bubble bar from the milk. No sugar is added on top. Neither is a low calorie food. See the nutrition information for sugar and calorie content.
Does inulin count as fiber on a US label?
Inulin counts as dietary fiber on a US label on the strength of an FDA guidance document. When the FDA rewrote the Nutrition Facts label it narrowed what may be declared as dietary fiber to carbohydrates with a demonstrated physiological benefit. That left several common ingredients in limbo, inulin among them.
On June 14, 2018 the agency published guidance naming eight non-digestible carbohydrates it had reviewed:
mixed plant cell wall fibers (a broad category that includes fibers like sugar cane fiber and apple fiber, among many others), arabinoxylan, alginate, inulin and inulin-type fructans, high amylose starch (resistant starch 2), galactooligosaccharide, polydextrose, and resistant maltodextrin/dextrin
From the FDA constituent update of June 14, 2018. The agency said it intends to add these to the regulatory definition and will exercise enforcement discretion in the meantime.
The rulemaking that would write inulin into the regulatory definition has not finished, so for now its place in the Dietary Fiber line rests on that enforcement discretion.
Is inulin a sugar or a sweetener?
Inulin is neither a sugar nor a sweetener, although its chains are built from fructose, which is a sugar. Those chains pass through the small intestine undigested and the Total Sugars line does not count them. Their contribution lands in the Dietary Fiber figure instead.
Nor is inulin a polyol. Maltitol, sorbitol and isomalt are sugar alcohols, which get their own treatment on a nutrition panel. Our guide to sugar alcohols covers that family properly.
Both bars run above 10 percent polyols (44 g per 100 g in the dark bar, 40 g in the bubble bar), so each pack carries the line excessive consumption may produce laxative effects. Polyols are used because the body absorbs them slowly; a couple of squares at a time is how a bar like this gets eaten anyway.
Inulin turns up in seven products across our range: three of our chocolate bars, both sizes of the coated buttons and both 450 g fruit cakes.
Frequently asked questions
Is inulin a sugar?
No. Inulin is a dietary fiber built from chains of fructose units that your body cannot break down. Because it is not digested, it is not counted in the Total Sugars line on a Nutrition Facts panel. Its contribution shows up in the Dietary Fiber figure.
Does inulin count toward my daily fiber?
Yes. Inulin is declared as dietary fiber and counts toward the 28 g Daily Value the FDA uses on the Nutrition Facts label. A 25 g serving of our Dark Chocolate with Orange carries 2 g of fiber in total, from the inulin and the cocoa together, which is 7 percent of a day.
Why does one Diablo pack list inulin on its own and another inside a bracket?
Both name the same ingredient. On the Milk Chocolate Bubble Bar it sits inside the chocolate's own bracket. On the Dark Chocolate with Orange it is listed on its own, fifth of nine ingredients. Ingredients are ordered by weight, so its position tells you roughly how much of it is in there.