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Stevia is a sweetener made from the leaves of the Stevia rebaudiana plant. The sweet compounds in the leaf, called steviol glycosides, are 200 to 400 times sweeter than table sugar, so they are used in tiny amounts. US labels show them as steviol glycosides, stevia leaf extract or Reb A.
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.
What does stevia look like on a US ingredients list?
The United States does not use E numbers, so you will see the ingredient written out: steviol glycosides, stevia leaf extract, rebaudioside A or Reb A. Which name appears depends on the supplier and the form used.
The Food and Drug Administration 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". GRAS stands for Generally Recognized as Safe, the route by which an ingredient enters the US food supply.
That purity line is why the wording on a label matters. Stevia leaf extract on an ingredient list means the purified extract, not the raw leaf material, which the agency treats 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."
If you want the wider picture of how sweeteners are named on the package, 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 examples from opposite ends of the catalog, one per range: 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.
No Added Sugar range. 1.1 g sugars per 100 g, naturally occurring in the cocoa.
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 our Sugar Free range, at 0.1 g of sugars per 100 g. Two different claims with two different rulebooks, and stevia turns up in both. In the gummies the steviol glycosides are the final ingredient on the list.
Not a low calorie food. See nutrition information for sugar and calorie content. Diablo Sugar Free products are not for weight control.
Is stevia regulated the same way in the US and the UK?
Not quite. In the US the deciding line is purity, which is why you will never see an American label declaring whole stevia leaf as a sweetener. The ingredient either meets the purity standard and goes in, or it does not.
Great Britain draws the line differently, with a permitted additives list. The same purified material carries an E number there: E960a for glycosides from stevia, E960b from fermentation and E960c produced enzymatically, per the GOV.UK register of approved additives. Same ingredient, two different filing systems.
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 center?
They share a species, Stevia rebaudiana, but not a legal status. Food manufacturers use a purified extract of the leaf, 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.