Chocolate has plenty of health benefits including antioxidants and stress-relieving properties, but did you know that chocolate contains caffeine as well?
How much caffeine is in chocolate?
Chocolate is caffeinated. Yes, as shocking as that may seem, infamous chocolate contains caffeine. Among all the chemical compounds that chocolate has to offer there are antioxidants, psychoactive ingredients, and trace amounts of caffeine.
While chocolate is caffeinated, eating it won’t give you a jolt of energy like coffee or tea can. The amount of caffeine in each piece of chocolate can be measured by the percentage of cacao the chocolate contains. Darker chocolate contains more cacao than milk chocolate, so it will also have more caffeine.
A 20-ounce dark chocolate bar with 70% cacao contains 28 mg of caffeine. A 20-ounce semi-sweet chocolate bar with 45% cacao contains 16 mg of caffeine and a regular milk chocolate bar of the same weight contains as little as 4 mg caffeine.
| Amount of Cacao | Caffeine Content in 20 oz |
| Milk (~10%) | 4 mg |
| Semi-sweet (45%) | 16 mg |
| Dark (70%) | 28 mg |
Some people with health conditions need to closely monitor their caffeine intake to stay healthy, but most people don’t need to worry about the caffeine content of chocolate. Part of this is because the caffeine from chocolate affects us differently.
We mentioned earlier that chocolate is a unique substance because of the wide variety of chemical compounds it contains. One of the chocolate’s more prolific compounds is theobromine, which is a psychoactive ingredient.
Theobromine helps your body metabolize caffeine, making it less potent. While you could consume enough chocolate to match the caffeine content of a cup of coffee, it wouldn’t feel as strong as just drinking a cup of coffee.
The theobromine found in chocolate partly neutralizes the chocolate’s caffeine content, making it an extremely efficient way to stay awake. The good news, however, is that most of us do not need to worry about how the caffeine in our chocolate will affect us.
Does white chocolate have caffeine?
Contrary to popular belief, white chocolate isn’t chocolate. This is counterintuitive because “chocolate” is in the name, but white chocolate does not contain any cacao. Cacao consists of the dry solids from the cacao bean. You probably know it as cocoa powder.
Cacao is what gives chocolate its delicious flavor. White chocolate is made from a combination of milk products and a substance called chocolate liquor. Chocolate liquor is not alcoholic. It is made from the fatty and liquid components of the cacao bean.
Although chocolate liquor is made from the cacao bean, it is not considered chocolate because it does not have the same chemical compounds or the same flavor that cacao has. Many milk chocolate bars are made almost entirely from chocolate liquor and contain only a small sprinkling of cacao to give them a chocolate flavor.
White chocolate does not contain cacao. It only contains chocolate liquor. Since cacao is where chocolate’s natural caffeine comes from, white chocolate does not contain caffeine. White chocolate is a godsend for chocolate fanatics who can’t have caffeine for health reasons.
How much chocolate is equivalent to one cup of coffee?
Chocolate does not contain a lot of caffeine. Milk chocolate contains even less. Darker chocolate bars contain more cacao. It is the cacao that contains chocolate’s natural caffeine so the darker the chocolate is, the more caffeine it contains even if that amount is minuscule.
The average cup of coffee typically contains 95 mg of caffeine. This is assuming the coffee was not cold brewed and was not made with an espresso machine. Milk chocolate is a type of chocolate that is very on the market. It also contains the least amount of caffeine.
The average milk chocolate bar contains about 3.5 to 6 mg of caffeine per ounce depending on the size of the chocolate bar and its cacao content. To make this easy, we will be comparing a standard 8-ounce cup of brewed coffee to a 1.5-ounce Hershey’s bar.
If you were to eat enough Hershey’s bars to achieve the caffeine content that an 8-ounce cup of coffee would give you, that would take 10.5 Hershey’s chocolate bars. These chocolate bars would need to be consumed in the same amount of time it would take you to drink that 8-ounce cup of coffee.
For some of us chocoholics, this is an achievable goal but even if you were to inhale such a large amount of chocolate in such a short amount of time, the caffeine would metabolize differently. Chocolate’s caffeine kick feels different from coffee’s because chocolate contains theobromine.
As we mentioned earlier, theobromine metabolizes caffeine. Because chocolate contains a large amount of theobromine, it won’t give you a caffeine buzz the way coffee can. Coffee, in contrast, contains very low amounts of theobromine.
On average, a cup of coffee contains about 10-15 times the amount of caffeine that can be found in one ounce of chocolate. If it is caffeine, you are looking for, chocolate is delicious but inefficient in comparison to coffee.
How much chocolate is equivalent to one cup of tea?
Tea contains much less caffeine than coffee does so it would take less chocolate to achieve the same amount of caffeine. Green tea has less caffeine than coffee. A standard cup of coffee basically contains 95 mg of caffeine while an 8-ounce cup of green tea contains anywhere from 15-40 mg.
If you are trying to match the caffeine content of a cup of green tea, you would need to eat 6 Hershey’s chocolate bars. In comparison, an 8-ounce cup of black tea contains around 50 mg of caffeine per cup. This equates to 7.5 Hershey’s chocolate bars.
These are more reasonable numbers but remember that the theobromine found in chocolate makes the effects that caffeine has on the bloodstream minimal, so regardless of how delicious chocolate is, it is an extremely inefficient way to get caffeine.