emergency chocolate at whole foods

All photographs ©
Ron Dunlap/Doglight Studios

Gourmet chocolate, the really good stuff is often hard to find, or requires a trip and sometimes even a special order where waiting for your treat to arrive requires the patience of a saint. Yet sometimes, if you are like me, you find yourself having a gourmet chocolate emergency. This is the time, when you absolutely need to cram your mouth full of rich, creamy, high quality chocolate or something undesirable like a chocolate homicide may occur in your immediate vicinity.

Fear not. There is a solution: your friendly, neighborhood Whole Foods grocery store. Each Whole Foods offers a different gourmet chocolate selection depending on where you live as their buying is “decentralized.” This basically means, each buyer purchases the best chocolates available in their region for their customers.

Our recent sampling included these luscious Whole Foods offerings:

The 365 Whole Foods, Organic Dark Chocolate with Almonds is simply nosh worthy. The chocolate is smooth, dark, and each bite delivers a satisfying amount of toasted crushed almonds. This is the kind of chocolate bar where you can savor each bite or mindlessly devour.

For a nuanced and elegant chocolate, look no further than the Kallari 70% single source, organic chocolate. This chocolate bar delivers on everything you might imagine with an artisanal chocolate. The chocolate is rich, silky, robust and followed by a surprisingly subtle vanilla aftertaste.

Delicately and glamorously swirled with a creamy ribbon of cherry, cherry and chocolate fans are sure to fall head over heels in love with the Bissingers All Natural Cherry Chocolate Bar. Our bar was inhaled by such a fan in a matter of seconds while our tester kept exclaiming “what a wonderful cherry taste” or at least that’s what we think he was saying because his mouth was full of chocolate.

What’s also wonderful about the Whole Foods selection is that they offer a broad range of smaller artisanal chocolate bars so you can afford to be adventurous and try something you might normally not try as evidenced in the Dolphin Dark Pink Peppercorns from Brazil. While you don’t usually think of peppercorns and chocolate, this is an thoroughly addictive and creative combination. The dark chocolate melts on your tongue and then the pink peppercorns bloom like a flower in your mouth - a highly unusual but desirous sensation.

My favorite of the chocolates was the Theo Bread and Chocolate, Dark Chocolate Bar. When we opened the bar we were disappointed as we were hoping to see large chunks of bread. Then we took our first bite and our disappointment vanished as quickly as the bar did. We were rewarded with crunchy sourdough bread crumbs mixed with an extraordinary smooth dark chocolate. A divine experience that that clearly affirmed Whole Foods as a dependable emergency chocolate destination.


whole foods store locations