Overview
Fabien and colleagues tested one dark and one white chocolate bar from each of eight small-scale West Java producers for microbial counts and for lead and cadmium by ICP-MS. All bars met Indonesian limits. One white chocolate bar slightly exceeded the EU cadmium limit for low-cocoa chocolate. Lead and cadmium both rose with declared cocoa-solid content.
Key numbers
- Dark chocolate: lead mean 0.104 ± 0.044 mg/kg (0.052 to 0.176 across producers), cadmium mean 0.153 ± 0.032 mg/kg (0.108 to 0.192) (Table 6, p. 8).
- White chocolate: lead mean 0.037 ± 0.011 mg/kg, cadmium mean 0.084 ± 0.015 mg/kg; producer C white bar cadmium 0.105 ± 0.015 mg/kg (Table 6).
- Correlation with declared cocoa solids: cadmium r = 0.92, lead r = 0.87 (Table 6; p. 8).
Methods (brief)
About 0.5 g of homogenized chocolate was microwave-digested in nitric acid and hydrogen peroxide and measured by ICP-MS (AOAC 2013.06) in an ISO/IEC 17025 laboratory. LOQs were 0.003 mg/kg for lead and 0.002 mg/kg for cadmium. The only reference material was a soil CRM.
Evidence Fitness
Sensitive method, but only one bar per producer and type, so the reported SDs reflect replicate analyses rather than product variability, and the soil CRM does not check the chocolate matrix. Some internal inconsistencies (a stated cocoa-solids average that conflicts with Table 1, misattributed citations) lower confidence in the write-up but not in Table 6. Chocolate bars are a proxy for chocolate pudding and chocolate nut candy, which are not linked.