Why don’t Cocomel Bites look shiny and crisp like many other rounded chocolate-covered products? Because we have chosen not to use a glaze or polish on our products. As we say on the package, “We like to keep it straightforward, so no shiny glazes were added to these blissful beauties”. Why no shiny glazes? Because we don’t want to use Confectioner’s Glaze, Confectioner’s Polish, or Shellac at this time. These are all different names for a glaze made from Shellac, a resin produced by an Asian beetle. Being a plant-based product we didn’t want to use an insect derived ingredient.
OK, so no glaze, but why the scuff marks? Our Bites products that are covered in chocolate are done so via “panning”, which tumbles the creamy bites center as chocolate is sprayed onto them. As a result, Cocomel Bites are born rolling and tumbling over each other, leading to inevitable scuffs.
After that, depending on their journey to you, the scuffs on Bites can be either reduced or enhanced based on the temperatures they experience.
- If Bites encounter the perfect gentle warmth of about 70-80 degrees, the chocolate will lightly soften, reducing the scuff marks.
- If Bites stay cooler (like they mostly do), the original scuff marks will remain intact, or increase depending on how jostled they are in transit.
- If Bites get hot, above 80 degrees, the chocolate can actually melt, and if it cools again we get BLOOM, a whitish coating. This is from the cocoa butter migrating to the surface of the chocolate and crystalizing. You can still eat this, but the experience isn’t quite a good as perfect chocolate. We want to avoid bloomed chocolate.
These pictures illustrate the difference. The first two are perfect Bites, the last one shows Bloomed Bites:
This is why Cocomel Bites often have a whitish, scuffy appearance. If you don’t have bloom (where the entire piece is blanketed in white) then this is totally normal and a by-product of us trying to keep our products as simple and straightforward as possible, with as few extra ingredients as possible.
If you have other questions, please contact as at info[at]cocomel.com. We type the email that way so internet crawlers don’t scoop up our email and drown us in spam. [at] = @
JJ