Household Ingredients Compared  ›  Chocolate Chips and Baking Chocolate (Singapore)

Chocolate chips and baking chocolate: what's actually in it?

Baking chocolate is chocolate built to survive the oven: chips and chunks that hold their shape in a cookie, and callets and blocks that melt for ganache and moulding. The list tells you which you are holding. Real chocolate starts with sugar and cocoa (chocolate / cocoa mass, cocoa butter); 'white creme' chips contain no cocoa mass at all — they are sugar, palm oil and milk, and the front of the bag does not always make that obvious. Cocoa percentage, where stated, is the share of cocoa solids; a higher number is not a quality verdict, it is a recipe fact. This page covers chips, chunks, callets and baking bars — not chocolate bars for eating, cocoa powder, or chocolate spread, which have their own pages.

This page does not give a health score or a "best" pick. It shows the ingredient list as printed, with the country of manufacture as printed, and flags where a list could not be verified.

The headline, in 30 seconds

• Sugar is first in every chip panelled here. Hershey's Semi-Sweet, Milk and Mini chips all start with sugar, then chocolate, then cocoa butter. That is what a baking chip is — sweetened chocolate in a bake-stable shape.
• White creme is not white chocolate. Hershey's Premier White Creme Chips list sugar, palm kernel oil, milk, nonfat milk and hydrogenated palm oil — cocoa butter appears only after those, and there is no cocoa mass. Compare Callebaut's white chunks, which list sugar, whole milk powder and cocoa butter.
• Callebaut is the professional end of this shelf. Its dark chunks and drops list sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, soya lecithin and natural vanilla flavouring — five items, with the cocoa content stated (45.5% for the dark chunks, 43.5% for the extra-small dark drops).
• Two different Hershey's nutrition figures exist for the same chip. The Open Food Facts SG-barcode row gives 477 kcal per 100 g; Hershey's own foodservice spec gives 469–475 kcal with 5.06 g protein and 4.26 mg sodium. Both are flagged; the table uses the SG-barcode row.

At a glance

Panelled with verbatim lists: 8 products. Seen-but-not-verified: see the list below. No prices are shown: they change weekly and would go stale. This site compares ingredients only.

Seen but not verified — do not panel until checked

• Bakers 365 Baking Chocolate Chips — Semi Sweet (250 g) — listed at FairPrice, Halal; no ingredient section retrieved.
• Bakeway Baking Chips — Dark Cocoa — listed at FairPrice (Phoon Huat house brand); no ingredient section retrieved.
• RedMan Baking Dark Cocoa Chips and RedMan Cocoa Chips — Bakeable — listed at FairPrice; no ingredient section retrieved.
• Ghirardelli Chocolate Premium Baking Chips — Bittersweet — listed at FairPrice; no ingredient section retrieved.
• Callebaut callets — Dark 52.3%, Bittersweet 60.6%, White W2 28%, Milk Ecuador 39% — retailer lists exist for these (for example W2 white callets: sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk powder, cocoa mass, emulsifier soya lecithin, natural vanilla; per 100 g 569 kcal, fat 36 g, saturates 22 g, carbohydrate 55 g, sugars 55 g, protein 6.0 g, salt 0.21 g), but no SG pack transcription was retrieved for any of them, so none is panelled here.
• Hershey's 25% Less Sugar Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips — US list retrieved (sugar, chocolate, maltitol, cocoa butter, milk fat 2%, cocoa processed with alkali, lecithin (soy), natural flavor; per 100 g 466 kcal, sugars 40 g, added sugars 40 g); SG sale not verified, so not panelled as an SG product.
• Baking chocolate bars / blocks (dark, milk, white) and compound chocolate — sold through Phoon Huat / RedMan and baking suppliers; no SG lists retrieved in this pass. Compound chocolate (which replaces cocoa butter with vegetable fat) is a different product from couverture and needs its own rows if added.

Nutrition — what the numbers say

All figures in the sortable table are as sold, per 100 g (or per 100 ml for liquids, where the source gives per-100 ml). Click a column header to sort low to high; click again for high to low. Rows marked "not stated" always sort last — a missing figure is not zero. Per-serving-only figures are in a separate table below and are never sorted against per-100 g figures.

Salt and sodium: salt = sodium × 2.5. The table shows sodium as printed (in mg) with the salt equivalent in brackets. Sodium is not presented as salt, and salt is not presented as sodium.

Total vs added sugars: Singapore packs list total sugars, not added sugars. A total-sugars figure is never labelled here as "added sugar". Where a source states an added-sugars figure separately, it is noted. The ingredient list remains the evidence for added sugar versus naturally occurring sugars.

Open Food Facts is a community database and is flagged as secondary where used: the pack and the retailer nutrition section take precedence if they disagree. Figures marked "not stated" were not in the source retrieved; they are not estimated, borrowed from another variant, or copied across flavours. No Nutri-Grade is quoted or assigned on any page in this batch — no official Nutri-Grade was found printed on any of these products, and these are not drinks in the Nutri-Grade sense except where a drink is involved (none here).

Observed numbers, no verdict: the three tabled chips give 467–477 kcal, 26–30 g fat and 53–58 g sugars per 100 g, with added sugars essentially equal to total sugars — the sugar in a baking chip is added sugar, and the ingredient list (sugar first) already says so. Conflict flagged: Hershey's own foodservice documents give different figures for the semi-sweet chip (an earlier spec: 531 kcal, fat 29.16 g, carbohydrate 57.76 g, sugars 54.90 g, protein 5.06 g; a later spec: 475.75 kcal, fat 26.45 g, saturated fat 16.54 g, carbohydrate 66.26 g, sugars 57.61 g, added sugars 57.26 g, protein 5.06 g, sodium 4.26 mg). The table uses the Open Food Facts SG-barcode row (477 kcal) for the regular chips and the rev. B spec (469 kcal) for the mini chips; the SG pack must settle which figure its own panel prints. Saturated fat and sodium were not stated in the SG-barcode row, so they are not borrowed from the US spec.

Seen but not verified (nutrition): no per-100 g nutrition panel was verified in this pass for Hershey's Premier White Creme Chips, Callebaut Baking Chocolate Chunks — Dark, Callebaut Baking Chocolate Drops — Extra Small Dark, Callebaut Baking-Stable White Chocolate Chunks, Callebaut Dark Chocolate Callets — Semisweet 54.5%. Their ingredient panels are unchanged; their nutrition figures are not estimated here.

How to read a chocolate chips and baking chocolate label — the jargon, in plain English

Cocoa mass / chocolate / unsweetened chocolate

Ground cocoa beans — the chocolate itself. When it leads a list, the product is chocolate-first; when sugar leads, the product is sugar-first with chocolate second.

Cocoa butter

The fat pressed out of cocoa beans. Real chocolate contains it; compound chocolate replaces it with vegetable fat (usually palm). Its position in the list is the tell.

Callets

Drop-shaped pieces of couverture chocolate, made for melting, moulding and enrobing as well as baking. A callet is not a chip — chips are formulated to hold their shape in the oven.

Bake-stable

Chips or chunks formulated to keep their shape during baking instead of melting into the batter. Usually a lower cocoa-butter content and a specific temper.

White creme vs white chocolate

White chocolate contains cocoa butter (and milk); white creme replaces the cocoa butter with palm or palm kernel oil and contains no cocoa mass. The ingredient list, not the colour, is the difference.

Cocoa percentage

The share of the chocolate that comes from cocoa beans (mass plus butter). A 54.5% dark callet has more cocoa and less sugar than a 43.5% drop, other things being equal.

Maltitol

A sugar alcohol used to replace some sugar (in the 25% less-sugar Hershey's chips). It is still a sweetener, and it is listed as an ingredient, not hidden.

What this page is not

• Not a health score, and not a "best" pick. The products above are different products, and this page does not rank them.
• Not a taste test, and not a price comparison. Prices change weekly; ingredients change less often, but still change.
• Not complete. The products in seen-but-not-verified are not yet panelled, for the verification reasons given, not hidden.

Sources and method

Checked 12 November 2026 from: FairPrice baking-chocolate-and-cocoa category page (Hershey's Chocolate Chips — Semi-Sweet 285 g, Hershey's Chocolate Mini Chips — Semi-Sweet 340 g, Hershey's Baking Chips — Milk Chocolate 326 g, Hershey's Premier White Creme Chips, Bakers 365 Baking Chocolate Chips — Semi Sweet 250 g, Bakeway Baking Chips — Dark Cocoa, RedMan Baking Dark Cocoa Chips, RedMan Cocoa Chips — Bakeable, Ghirardelli Chocolate Premium Baking Chips — Bittersweet); Open Food Facts (Hershey's Semi-Sweet SG barcode 6942836725358: 477 kcal, fat 27 g, carbohydrate 66 g, sugars 57 g, added sugars 57 g; Hershey's Milk Chocolate Chips: 467 kcal, fat 30 g, saturates 20 g, carbohydrate 60 g, sugars 53.3 g); Hershey foodservice specifications (semi-sweet mini chips: semi-sweet chocolate [sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, milk fat, soy lecithin, natural flavor]; rev. B nutrition 468.72 kcal, fat 26.45 g, carbohydrate 66.26 g, sugars 57.61 g, added sugars 57.62 g, protein 5.06 g; earlier spec 531.29 kcal; webstaurantstore bulletin 475.75 kcal, saturated fat 16.54 g, sodium 4.26 mg); published white-chocolate comparison (Hershey's Premier White Creme Chips list); Baktotaal retailer lists (Callebaut dark chunks, extra-small dark drops, white chunks, with cocoa percentages); Gourmet Food Store retailer lists (Callebaut callets 52.3%, 54.5%, 60.6%, white W2). Cold Storage publishes no ingredient list on any product page, so its shelf could not be panelled from its site. Full per-fact source list is in the accompanying research notes. Nutrition: figures are standardised to per 100 g where the source gives per-100 figures; sugars are total sugars as printed, with added sugars noted separately only where the source states them; salt = sodium × 2.5. Where a full pack list could not be verified, the product is in seen-but-not-verified instead of being panelled.