What Is Soya Lecithin? The E322 Emulsifier in Chocolate

Both of these bars list it: fourth of five ingredients on the dark, sixth of seven on the milk.

What is soya lecithin made from?

Crude soybean oil carries a few percent of gummy phospholipids. When the oil is refined, water is mixed in. Those compounds swell into a gum and a centrifuge spins them out. Dried, that gum is the thick golden lecithin sold to food makers, a by-product of producing cooking oil.

The name comes from the Greek word for egg yolk, where lecithin was first identified in the 1840s. Today most food lecithin comes from soya, with sunflower and rapeseed the usual alternatives. On the Great Britain approved additives list all of them share one number, E322 lecithins.

Why is lecithin in chocolate?

Chocolate is solid particles, cocoa and milk powder and sweetener, suspended in cocoa butter. Those particles do not coat easily with fat, so melted chocolate without help is thick and slow. A phospholipid has one end that likes fat and one end that does not, and it settles on the surface of each particle so the fat can flow around it.

Makers use that to save cocoa butter, because chocolate with lecithin in it pours and fills a mould on less of it.

Our No Added Sugar Dark Chocolate 85g lists five ingredients in this order: sweetener (maltitol), cocoa paste, cocoa butter, emulsifier (soya lecithin) and flavouring. Ingredients are listed by weight, so the bar holds more maltitol, cocoa paste and cocoa butter than lecithin.

Is soya lecithin an allergen?

For labelling, yes. Soya is one of the 14 allergens that UK law requires a label to emphasise in the ingredients list whenever it is used. The allergen list in Annex II of the Food Information Regulation exempts fully refined soybean oil and fat and a few soya derived vitamin E, plant sterol and plant stanol ingredients, but not lecithin. That is why both bars above declare soya as an allergen.

If you avoid soya, sunflower lecithin does the same job. Our No Added Sugar Dubai Chocolate 200g uses sunflower lecithin with two other emulsifiers and has no soya among its ingredients. Always read the allergen line on the pack you are buying, including the may contain wording.

Is soya lecithin safe to eat?

Yes. When the European Food Safety Authority looked at E322 again in 2017, its panel judged a numerical acceptable daily intake unnecessary and found no safety concern for the general population over one year of age (EFSA Journal, 2017). In the US, lecithin is affirmed as generally recognised as safe under 21 CFR 184.1400.

Lecithin is not a sweetener and makes no real difference to the sugars line. Our Milk Chocolate 85g reads 6.7 g sugars per 100 g, and those are naturally occurring sugars from the milk, with no sugar added. The Dark 85g and Dubai 200g contain naturally occurring sugars too, with none added. The sweetness in both 85g bars comes from maltitol, explained in our guide to what maltitol is.

Frequently asked questions

Is soya lecithin bad for you?

No. EFSA's 2017 review of E322 found no reason to cap it with a daily intake figure. Because it comes from soya it is labelled as soya, so check the allergen line if you avoid it.

Is soya lecithin vegan?

Soya lecithin itself comes from a plant. Whether a chocolate is vegan depends on every other ingredient, and milk powder or butter rules most milk chocolate out.

What is the difference between soya and sunflower lecithin?

The source oil. Both are E322 and both do the same job in chocolate, but only soya lecithin has to be highlighted as an allergen on a UK label.

Does lecithin contain sugar?

A little, as a few percent of the lecithin itself. Chocolate uses it in tiny amounts, so it makes no real difference to the sugars figure on a nutrition panel.

Browse our chocolate bars