About
About Chocolate Panda: Sources, Ads and Corrections
Chocolate Panda is an independent guide to chocolate, from the cocoa farm to the factory floor to the home kitchen. Some readers want to know why one bar snaps cleanly and another bends. Others are planning a factory. The site is written for both, and for everyone in between.
It is organized in six sections. Chocolate 101 starts with the basics. Taste and culture is about eating chocolate, and it is where chocolate reviews will appear. Make it at home is for home kitchens, Chocolate making professionally is for people who make it for a living, and Chocolate business is for anyone costing out a shop, a brand or a production line. A sixth section, News and interviews, is still to come. Terms that come up across the site are defined in the chocolate glossary.
Chocolate Panda starts in English. Other languages will follow.
Where the numbers come from
Every number we take from somewhere else links to where it came from. That covers temperatures, legal limits, prices and statistics, and the link goes to a paper, a regulation, a standard, an official statistic or a maker’s data sheet, so you can click through and check it yourself. When a figure is our own arithmetic, the article says so.
Regulations are cited with the date we checked them. Food law gets amended, and a limit that was correct last year may not be correct today, so the date tells you how current the citation is.
Some common claims have no source behind them at all. When that happens, the article leaves the number out. The open question goes at the end of the article under “Sources and open questions”, where you can see what is still unknown instead of reading a guess written up as a fact.
Articles don’t name equipment or ingredient brands. When a maker’s own page is the source for a figure, it is cited as the maker’s page, so you know who is making the claim.
Advertising and independence
The only advertising on Chocolate Panda is banner ads in the sidebar, and each one is labeled “Sponsored”.
Advertisers never appear inside articles. There are no sponsored articles, no quotes from advertisers and no affiliate links, so nothing in an article earns money when you click a link or buy something. No advertiser can change a score, a ranking or a sentence.
How we rate chocolate
Chocolate reviews carry a Panda Score, a score out of 10 with one decimal. At least two tasters score each chocolate, and they taste blind, without knowing whose chocolate is in front of them, so the brand, the packaging and the price can’t sway the score. The full method is on the Panda Score page.
Who writes here
Articles are written and edited by Oliver Bennett, Chocolate Panda’s chocolate editor. His page lists what he covers and everything he has written for the site.
How AI tools are used
We use AI tools to help with research and first drafts. A tool can find a paper or suggest a structure, but it is never the source of a fact. Every number and claim in a published article is checked against the source it links to, and every article is reviewed and signed by a named editor before it goes up.
Corrections
When a fact in an article turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected. The article’s “Updated” date changes, and a short note at the end of the article says what changed. If you come back to an article you read before, the date shows whether anything has moved since.
To report an error, email editor@chocolatepanda.com or send a message to Chocolate Panda on LinkedIn. Tell us which article and which sentence, and link to a source if you have one.