Inclusion ratio in chocolate bar manufacturing

Hello everyone.

Interesting thing I came across- what is the ratio of inclusions(size of inclusions also) to put in a chocolate bar?

Thing is- we were making bars last year and this order will repeat this year and we are trying to find some answers as we had plenty of problems last year making bars with inclusions in a ratio of 2:1. It was 80g of Belgian milk chocolate and 40 grams of inclusions. the thickness of a bar was 5mm and it was almost impossible to vibrate the bar evenly over the surface are (bardimensions120x180mm) inclusion size was up to 15mm.

The problem we came across was that the 'mix' of chocolate and inclusions was getting hard in 3 minutes, which had a major impact on our speed of the line. therefore the batch size could only be limited, since the vibration was a problem as well.

Basically this is a short story, but the question really is: What is the science behind the ratio of inclusions and chocolate for a chocolate bar and/or for spinning?

Best Regards, Arthur

No hard and fast rules of thumb. often inclusions will be in the 7-15% range (ie if you've got a 100g bar, you'll have 85-93g of chocolate). One thing you can try to do is pre-warm the inclusions to the temperature of your tempered chocolate to help prevent the cooling effect you're seeing on your chocolate as a result of the cold inclusions taking the heat out of the chocolate, resulting in it's solidifying prematurely. take care not to over warm them as doing so will detemper your chocolate.