On paper, dark chocolate is one of the simplest vegan desserts there is. Cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar. All plants. In practice, of the 319 chocolate products in our database, exactly 7 pass a vegan check.
Milk fat is the usual spoiler
A lot of "dark" chocolate is dark in colour, not in recipe. Manufacturers add milk fat, butterfat or clarified butter to soften the snap and round out the flavour, and none of those words trigger the alarm that "milk" does when you skim a label quickly. Whey powder turns up for the same reason. In our full database, whey alone appears on 2,858 products.
The percentage on the front of the pack does not settle it either. A 70% cocoa bar can still carry milk fat in the remaining 30%.
Then come the traces
Even when the recipe itself is clean, most chocolate is made on lines that also run milk chocolate. That is why so many bars carry a "may contain milk" warning. We surface that warning rather than deciding for you: for an allergy it is a real risk, for ethical veganism many people accept it. Either way you deserve to see it.
How to buy dark chocolate as a vegan
Three habits cover most cases. Read the full ingredient list, not the cocoa percentage. Treat "milk fat", "butterfat" and "whey" as milk, because they are. And when the bar is imported, remember the label may declare milk in its own language: lait, Milch, leche.
Or skip the squinting and see which chocolates in our database actually pass. The list is short, which is exactly the point.