Kei Okumura is an unrepentant chocoholic with a preference for the dark side.
The Silver Lake mother of an infant son reduced her chocolate munching during her recent pregnancy, but now she's back at Trader Joe's several times a week purchasing bars of dark chocolate.
"I always have two to four bars of different chocolate to nibble on daily," said Okumura, who figures she spends about $12 a week on the candy and has spent as much as $8 on a single bar.
At a time when overall chocolate sales are as flat as a Hershey bar, customers such as Okumura are fueling a surge in consumption of dark chocolate, typically characterized by its bitterness and hints of coffee and berries. And it's part of a big increase in sales of premium chocolates as well.
Hurt by obesity and sugar concerns, U.S chocolate sales fell 1% last year to just under $16 billion, according to Packaged Facts, a market research firm.
Yet the dark chocolate segment of the market grew almost 15% to $4 billion last year. It now accounts for 25.1% of all chocolate sold and is expected to gain an even larger share in coming years as consumer tastes shift. Milk chocolate sales slid 5.5% last year to $11.7 billion.
Okumura, 35, said she was intrigued by the claims that dark chocolate is more healthful than other forms of the confection, but she really likes the taste.
Dark chocolate has gained cachet as a food -- like almonds, blueberries and red wine -- that studies say is good for the heart.
That's because it has a high concentration of plant compounds called antioxidants, or flavonoids, which recent small studies have shown to improve cardiovascular function, said Dr. Leslie Cho, a cardiologist and researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, a large research hospital in Ohio.
"These are intriguing studies, but they all need more research," Cho said.
Physicians once thought that large doses of vitamins E and C, also both antioxidants, would improve cardiovascular health, but new research has found that large doses of the vitamins had no benefits and in some cases were actually harmful, Cho said.
Regardless, consumers are jumping at the chance to redefine chocolate as a health food, said Curtis Vreeland, a Packaged Facts senior analyst.
As a result, the number of new dark chocolate products tripled to 926 last year from 2002 and accounted for 63% of all new chocolate products introduced in 2006, Vreeland said.
