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Check The Ingredient List

“The less ingredients you have in it, the purer it is, the closer it is to being actual chocolate,” Jardine says. Cocoa butter adds richness, sugar adds sweetness (so don’t reach for a dark chocolate bar with 100-percent cacao if you want sweet), vanilla adds flavor, and soy can help make the liquid chocolate flow more easily when chocolate makers are forming it into bars (and it can also be used as a replacement for more-expensive cocoa butter).

Jacques Torres, an acclaimed chocolatier, agrees that fewer ingredients usually indicate a better bar. “The high-quality premium chocolate has a clean ingredient label without any flavorings or other chemicals,” Torres says. “There should only be these 5 ingredients: cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, [soy] lecithin and vanilla.”

Keep an eye out for chocolate with less sugar—a standard Hershey bar has 24 grams. If you’re looking for richness, look for fewer grams, but you might have to experiment to find your ideal combo of richness and sweetness. “A lot of people kind of just throw sugar in to make sure that it tastes good, and then it kind of gets that film around your teeth—when you have a good quality milk chocolate, that shouldn’t happen,” Jardine says. “It will just be creamier, richer because of the milk, not necessarily sweeter because of the sugar.”