Meiji Milk Chocolate — Japanese Chocolate Bar, 50g

Japan's everyday milk chocolate, and the bar Japanese home bakers melt down for cakes and truffles. It tastes the way a supermarket milk block tastes, sweet and smooth, but the cocoa comes through instead of getting lost under the milk. Buy it if you want the Japanese original rather than an Australian stand-in. If you want something darker and less sweet, its black sibling is the one, though that bar is milder than its name suggests, and if you are after something genuinely bitter, neither of these is it. It was the second best-selling chocolate in Japan on the national purchase-volume ranking for January to March 2025, and the ranked pack is this 50 g bar.

On the pack: 明治ミルクチョコレート

What you're getting

• It turns 100 on 13 September 2026. Meiji first sold it in 1926 and has sold it ever since.
• Made without vegetable fat. The fat in it comes from the cocoa bean: cocoa butter, plus the ground bean itself, which the label calls cocoa mass. Its black sibling, which we also stock, does contain vegetable fat.
• Still made to Japan's full chocolate standard. In 2024 Meiji cut the cocoa in around forty of its products far enough that they dropped below that standard; this bar was not one of them.
• It melts smoothly rather than sitting on the tongue, and it breaks up by hand without a knife.
• This is the bar Japanese recipes are written around, and they are written in bars rather than grams: most call for between two and five. Almost everything else in them is normal supermarket stock.
• Allergens: milk and soy. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.
• Allergens, and one thing the label does not settle: it names a flavouring without saying what that flavouring is made from, so this is not a bar we can call vegetarian.

There is no cocoa percentage for this bar, none has ever been published, so any figure you see quoted for it is somebody's guess. It is an eating bar rather than a couverture, the kind of chocolate made to be melted and re-set at controlled temperatures: fine for melting into cakes and truffles, which is exactly what Japanese recipes use it for, but not a chocolatier's coating chocolate. One practical thing before you order: Meiji's own storage limit is below 28 °C, and a Sydney summer runs well above that, so it is worth thinking about when you order rather than after it arrives.