Dairy-free chocolate from budget supermarket Aldi. It's quite odd to name your entire chocolate range 'Dairyfine' as if somehow chocolate and dairy products are inseparable, but that's Aldi for you. We vegans like our chocolate without the cow juice, so it's just as well that Aldi make a large range of dark chocolate without so much as a drop of milk fat in it. These two bars of plain dark and mint creme chocolate offer great value for money too:
The mint creme chocolate is a bar of 18 fondant-filled chunks. The taste is pretty good with a good strong peppermint aroma, while the chocolate shell is thick and crunchy.
The plain chocolate comes in red packaging that is UK specific and we think is meant to remind you of Bourneville. The taste is not quite like Bourneville which has pretty unique flavour, but is more like your average plain chocolate, not too rich, not too bitter, not too sweet. It's actually a pretty versatile chocolate that is good enough for eating and therefore good enough for cooking with too.
Verdict: Chunks of choc, for less than a chunk of change
Veganoo Score: ★★★☆☆
Aldi 'Dairyfine' Chocolate Bars plain / mint creme
Aldi 'Dairyfine' Chocolate Bars plain / mint creme
Footnote: Ingredients
Here is the ingredients panel from the pack we reviewed.
Sadly the mint one if no longer vegan. New recipe was introduced this month.!
ReplyDeleteSadly the mint one if no longer vegan. New recipe was introduced this month.!
ReplyDeleteOh no, thanks for the update!
ReplyDeleteMint one is now vegan again in my local Aldi :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip. Keep them coming!
DeleteMay also now contain Egg, not sure how you ever considered it vegan in the first place as it's made on the same machinery as their dairy bars so contamination risk is high!
ReplyDeleteYou need to read our review policy on the About Us page. Shared production lines don't make things non-vegan. Veganism is not an allergy.
DeleteBy using shared production (especially in the case of chocolate) means the end product probably isn't vegan at all, after speaking to chocolate manufacturers in the past it seems the way to clean the moulds is just to run chocolate through them which means some bars have large amounts of none vegan product in them.
DeleteVeganism comes from a belief that animals should not be harmed, by contributing to the dairy industry you are ensuring that they make profits that are used to produce dairy and hence kill baby calf's (the mothers are inceminated so they make milk, the calfs are taken so humans can drink the milk, the females enter the dairy chain and the males calf's are usually sent to veal slaughter, when they are no use the females are also sent to slaughter)...
If a vegan won't wear leather or eat honey then the also shouldn't be paying to kill animals!
I applaud the efforts of anyone starting out but when it comes to the dairy industry you really do have to be careful.
I will w8 for new recipe
ReplyDeleteAldi ingredients for the mint cream is the same for the lidl one, as of December 2017, the pack says suitable for vegetarians, but doesn't say vegan for this one, but the ingredients don't have anything non-vegan, so maybe it is a cross-contamination thing? Either way I'm lactose intollerant and I don't react to it, so no milk contamination here! :)
ReplyDeleteI was in Aldi today and read the ingredients list on the pack of Dairyfine dark chocolate and a milk derivative was listed so defo not vegan now.
ReplyDelete