"All you need is love," the legendary American cartoonist Charles Schulz once quipped. "But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt."
Belgians would appear to agree — perhaps excessively so. Surveys suggest that citizens of the country most closely associated with chocolate eat truly colossal quantities of the stuff.
The average Belgian consumes eight kilogrammes of chocolate per year: the world's third highest amount, after Germany and the UK. Studies also indicate that chocolate consumption in Belgium is not merely high on average, but pervasive: one in five Belgians eat chocolate every day; two in five consume it every week; and more than nine in ten indulge themselves at least once per month.
'A safe haven'
Other studies have suggested Belgians' relationship with chocolate may not merely border on the indulgent, but on the pathological.
One poll conducted by renowned Belgian chocolate maker Côte d'Or found that 44% of Belgians admit to eating more chocolate than they would like, while 12% confess to occasionally hiding chocolate from their partner, children, or parents.
Remarkably, despite the price of chocolate having risen 12.8% over the past year — more than twice the current rate of inflation — Belgians' tendency to consume the stuff has barely waned.
"Despite the crisis, Belgians remain fond of chocolate," the Marketing Director of chocolate behemoth Mondelez (which owns the Milka, Côte d'Or and Toblerone brands) Caroline Baume told l'Avenir. "While the end of 2022 was marked by a very slight decline [in sales] due to inflation, the market is already starting up again."
She added: "It proves that chocolate is a safe haven, a little pleasure that we like to give ourselves at any time, even when times are a little tougher."
Comment le prenez-vous?
Although love of chocolate is almost universal in Belgium, there appears to be no specific way in which the country's citizens prefer to consume it.
The vast majority, however, prefer to do so with a drink (79%), with coffee (44%) being by far the most popular beverage. 29% also like to consume chocolate together with other food, with strawberries and bananas being the customary choices.
In terms of the type of actual type chocolate consumed by Belgians, almost half (49%) name milk chocolate as their favourite, while 37% prefer dark chocolate.
White chocolate is the least popular (14%). Nevertheless, Belgians appear to be growing increasingly fond of white chocolate: a 2007 poll found that only 6% of Belgians preferred white chocolate, while 62% and 32% preferred milk and dark chocolate respectively.
For the few — not the many?
Despite exporting $3.1 billion worth of chocolate each year — equating to roughly 11% of global exports — outside of the country Belgian chocolate appears to remain popular primarily among connoisseurs, rather than the masses.
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According to a 2020 survey by the World Confectionary Conference, the world's two most popular chocolate brands — Cadbury Dairy Milk and Mars Bar — were not created in Belgium, but rather in the UK: a country which, ironically, has long been maligned for its food. No Belgian chocolate brands were named among the top five.
It would seem that, in the case of chocolate — much like in many other areas of life — there is simply no accounting for taste.
