Once a small specialty market item, vegan chocolate is becoming a major supermarket staple. Now, the consumer reviewers at CHOICE have made the call on which is the best.

Four expert chocolate connoisseurs blind-tasted 24 milk and dairy-free milk chocolates and 37 dark chocolates to see which ones would come out on top.

The taste testers didn’t know which products were dairy-free or not, so the vegan products had a fair go. Each sample was rated on aroma, texture, flavour and appearance—with flavour accounting for 90 per cent of each product’s score.

CHOICE marketer Alice Richard said one plant-based chocolate “stood head and shoulders above the rest”—Pico Original M*lk chocolate.

“Our expert taste testers rated it the best tasting of all the dairy-free chocolates in our test, with a taste score of 70 per cent—almost 20 percentage points higher than the second-best vegan chocolate,” said Ms Richard.

“What’s more, it had the second-highest cocoa content of all the products we tested, not just the vegan ones.”

In fact, the Pico outperformed many other milk chocolates from brands like Green & Black’s, Darrell Lea, Lindt and Cadbury by a big margin. For comparison, Darrell Lea scored 55 per cent and Cadbury Dairy Milk just 49 per cent.

However, it was also one of the most expensive at $7.50 per 100g, with the priciest of all tested the Pana Organic Mylk at a very steep $11.25 per 100g.