If you look hard enough, you can find vegan chocolate bars at the store. You’ll often have to read through a few ingredient lists to do so. Or, instead, you could just look for the popular brand behind the best vegan chocolate bar, Hu, and call it a day. In our ranking of vegan chocolate bars, our taste tester found that Hu’s Salty Dark Chocolate bar was the absolute best — delivering a balance of smooth, dark chocolate flavor and saltiness. In fact, Hu’s entire line of chocolate bars is vegan, with flavors from almond butter and puffed quinoa dark chocolate to hazelnut butter and crunchy mint.
With more elaborate options like hazelnut coffee and cashew butter and raspberry, as well as simple picks like plain dark chocolate and vanilla crunch, Hu offers a vegan chocolate square that’ll curb any late night sweet tooth — literally. Each bar breaks apart into eight bite-sized squares to give you a combination of deep dark chocolate flavor and smooth texture all in one bite. No milk or butter necessary. But, that’s really just the beginning of this popular vegan chocolate bar brand.
As it turns out, what really makes Hu the best of the best is not just the quality of its bars and the wide selection of vegan-friendly flavors that they provide — it’s also where the chocolate comes from and the people who make it.
Hu is all about the people (and the cocoa)
Before health-food fans and co-founders Jordan Brown, Jason Karp, and Jessica Karp started Hu Chocolate, the family members opened a NYC restaurant — Hu Kitchen — catering to alternative diets in 2012. But they struggled to find a chocolate bar that aligned with their health goals, and eventually started making their own brand of paleo-friendly chocolate to use in the restaurant’s baked goods — one that brought the values for short, sweet, and simple ingredients together with the same passion for quality you can taste. That’s how Hu Chocolate, the brand behind the best vegan chocolate bar, was born.
Originally offered in limited flavors directly from the restaurant, Hu Chocolate has expanded to an entire range of flavors sold in around 34,000 stores across the U.S., including Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, and Kroger, as well as in Canada and the U.K. It’s also available online at Amazon, where a pack of six Hu Chocolate bars is around $22. Hu Chocolate exemplifies all of the same values the cofounders championed in their restaurant, with each flavor beginning with its signature organic, Fair Trade Certified dark chocolate. Made with just three ingredients — cocoa, unrefined coconut sugar, and cocoa butter — and no refined sugars, lecithins, sugar alcohols, or palm oil, not only is Hu Chocolate good for vegans and chocolate lovers at large, but its Fair Trade certification ensures it’s good for the people who produce it and their communities too.
