What Is the Best Way to Measure the Color of Chocolate Chips?

Chocolate is one of the world's favorite sweets, but only if the taste is perfect. Moreso than with many other food products, color measurement is one of the best ways to determine product consistency in chocolate and chocolate goods. At HunterLab, chocolate chip color measurement is one of our specialties, and we're happy to share our catalog of spectrophotometers with anyone looking to improve their chocolate's quality through precise measurement.

Does Chocolate Chip Color Measurement Matter?

In most cases, food color informs buyers about the quality of their food. How fresh is it? Will it last long? Has it already started to go bad? With chocolate, coloration also offers other information. Most notably, it tells you just how much cocoa you can expect to taste when you bite into that chocolate chip cookie or pop a few chocolate chips into your mouth.

With chocolate, everyone has varied tastes. While some prefer their chocolate chips to be as dark as possible, others love a burst of white chocolate. The best way to appeal to all of these preferences is to ensure your colors are consistent and deliver the expected flavor.

Factors Determining the Color of Chocolate Chips

Aside from cocoa and the other ingredients that go into making chocolate chips, other aspects can affect your production outcome:

• Fat blooms: Fat blooms are harmless spots of discoloration that occur when milk fat coalesces at the surface of a piece of chocolate. These white-gray spots mostly affect texture and color, making your product unappealing to buyers.
• Fillers: Fillers refer to any ingredients not strictly necessary to make the chocolate. Instead, they “fill out” a batch, allowing manufacturers to get more chocolate from it. This is a common practice, but it can bring some unpredictable changes in chocolate chip color.

The Value of Spectrophotometers

The best way to maintain a fresh, consistent appearance in your chocolate is through quality chocolate chip color measurement tools. At HunterLab, we've created an ideal solution in Aeros, a powerful benchtop spectrophotometer that measures colors with the touch of a button.

This full-spectrum machine features a smart user interface that offers color matching using the most common color scales in the industry and includes built-in email capability. It also provides USB and ethernet connections so that you can send and manage your data from one device.

Get years of clean, concise color measurements for your chocolate chip products with HunterLab. Request a quote on our equipment today and see how we can revolutionize your facility.