Next January 2022, Swiss chocolatier lindt will launch Lindt Classic recipe vegan milk chocolate bars made with oat milk. The bars will be available in two different types: Smooth and Hazelnut. Lindt is replacing the milk with a combination of oat milk and almond paste to get a vegan certification.
This is not the first try that Lindt has launched vegan items. They've got into the vegan milk chocolate niche last year with a three-flavor line under its “HELLO” line collection in Germany and the UK. The bars were made with oat milk, and included Cookie, Salt, Caramel, and Hazelnut flavors. The new Lindt Classic Recipe bars will launch early next year in the United Kingdom at Sainsbury's and in other popular grocery retailers, as well in Amazon, where Lindt chocolate has an online shop.
Lindt is among a growing number of leading chocolate companies that are developing new vegan milk chocolate products. Though we had many brands offering vegan dark chocolate bars for a while, major brands started to make use of an extensive variety of plants such as oats, hazelnuts, and rice to create vegan milk chocolate.
In the last couple of years, almost every chocolatier in the UK launched some kind of vegan milk chocolate option. Back in 2019, and after half a year of research and development, the leading brand Mars introduced its first vegan milk chocolate Galaxy line. The bars were made with hazelnut paste and rice syrup to replace the dairy milk. They came in Smooth Orange, Caramel & Sea Salt, and Caramelized Hazelnut flavors.
This year, Nestlé introduces its first vegan version of its iconic KitKat bar made with rice milk in the UK, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Australia, and Brazil
Louise Barrett, Head of the Nestlé Confectionery Product Technology Center in York, said in a statement:
“Our challenge when we set out to create a vegan-friendly KitKat was to recreate this iconic product using plant-based alternatives,”
“To achieve this, we worked very hard to get the right balance between the milk alternative and the cocoa. The result is a vegan chocolate that we're very proud of, and I hope all KitKat fans will love it as much as we do.”
British multinational company Cadbury also launched its first line of vegan chocolate bars in the UK this year, made with almond paste in place of dairy, the Cadbury Plant Bars come in two flavors: Smooth Chocolate and Salted Caramel.
International American brand Hershey's has been testing for quite a while a vegan milk chocolate bar recipe made with oat milk instead of dairy. The Oat Made bars come in Classic Dark and Extra Creamy Almond & Sea Salt flavors and they have recently been introduced at a select number of retailers, including Target, as part of a real-time marketing test Hershey's is conducting until June 2022.
Also popular grocery chain Trader Joe's, taste-makers developed a vegan chocolate bar made with the store's existing Trader Joe's Almond Beverage. After several months in the making, the brand launched its first Organic Almond Beverage Chocolate Bar to add new vegan products to every department in the store.
