Is there wax in your chocolate?

The Internet tells you there is. Why?

From an early age, I remember being told to watch out for chocolate that was really just wax in disguise. Wax, as in a melted brown crayon, perhaps sprinkled with Nestlé Quik to give it some flavor. And they sell it as chocolate.

“Just look for paraffin in the ingredients list,” a wise elder once advised me. I never forgot the advice. And I’ve also never seen paraffin on an ingredients list.

In today’s hippier-than-thou pop culture, anything natural is perfect and wholesome and moral, and anything from an evil profit-driven corporation was automatically the opposite. In fact, you can make up anything ridiculously evil you want, and everyone will insist on believing it if it’s about an evil mega-corporation.

Such as: Chocolate has wax in it.

But don’t take my word for it. Click this Google search and scroll down through the results: What chocolate contains wax?

You’ll see nothing but claims that Hershey’s, Nestlé, Snickers, Cadbury, and anything else you’ve actually heard of contains wax. But is that ever true? Do these major producers — to whom cocoa beans are readily available — elect to compete on the world chocolatier stage with paraffin wax?

Well, of course, no. It’s total bullshit, which is why it’s featured on these pages. You will find no wax in those products — but you will find it in certain other confectionery products, and only with good reason. Shockingly, food producers use ingredients that makes sense given specific applications. Let’s have a look into how and why this bullshit belief became the de facto fact on the Internet.