Shelf Life: Setting Goals and Evaluating Products

When creating chocolate confections with a longer shelf life, a chef will likely need to strike a balance between flavor & texture and longevity. A ganache with a very low moisture content and level of water activity (and therefore a long shelf life) will be quite dry and firm and won't have the smooth, creamy texture we associate with a high-quality product. A simple mixture of fruit puree or cream and chocolate can impress with its pure flavor, silky texture, and freshness but may not be safe to consume for more than a day or even a few hours.

In this tenth and final article in the series, we'll look at factors a chocolatier should consider when setting shelf life goals and evaluating their products.

Business Success
Confectionery Shelf Life: Good Storage Practices

For optimal shelf life, how you package and store your chocolate confections can be as important as your recipe.
Confectionery Shelf Life: Good Storage Practices

Missed an article? Find the entire Shelf Life collection here!

A display case full of chocolate candies and confections

What are Your Goals?

These are some parameters to define before you start evaluating your products:

What level of shelf life do you expect? How long should your products remain viable?
- 90 days?
- No more than 60 days?
What specific chocolates, flavorings, and other ingredients will you use?
What level of quality do you feel you can reasonably offer at your selling price?
What types of storage are available to you, and what are the storage conditions?
- a room or cooler specifically for chocolate?
- a freezer? and are you able to flash-freeze your products?
How will your products be sold?
- will they be shipped, sold wholesale, or available only in your shop?

Only make shelf life claims that you are 100% certain of after full-length trials. You must be willing to do full time trials. No single measurement like Moisture Content or Water Activity can predict the future!

A chocolate bar with bloom and other signs of age

Making Shelf Life Claims

Always be conservative with your shelf life statements. It's much better to under-promise and over-deliver:

If you say your product will last for 40 days, and then it lasts for 60 days, then the customer is happy.
If you say your product will last for 60 days, and it lasts for only 40 days, then you have just lost a customer.

Tips for streamlining production:

If you have several ganache recipes, each with a Water Activity of .800, and those ganache recipes all proved to last for 60 days, you can safely assume that other ganache recipes with a similar formulation will also have an Aw of .800 and should also last for 60 days.

Achieving the same balance parameters in each recipe is a great way to safely assume that all of your recipes will have the same shelf life. For this reason, many chocolatiers have only 2 or 3 master ganache recipes to which they make only minor changes in terms of taste and texture for each product.

Our chefs have created a sample form to use when evaluating your products. If you are logged in to your Chocolate Academy™ account, you can download it at the link below.

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