Sugar or sucrose gives taste, texture and sensory appeal to chocolate. Replacing sucrose with the naturally occurring fruit sugar, fructose, produces chocolate with a different texture and sweetness from sugared chocolate.

In order to produce a sugar-free chocolate with similar taste and texture to sugared chocolate, one can use sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol, mannitol, isomalt, maltitol, lactitol and xylitol, to give the chocolate mass, volume and texture. Sugar alcohols are generally of a different sweetness and taste than sucrose and so they tend to be used in combination with bulking agents such as polydextrose and inulin. These bulking agents produce a warm soft feeling in the mouth. The sweetness can be improved by using high intensity sweeteners such as Sunett (acesulfame K), aspartame, cyclamate and saccharin.

Production methods may have to be altered to produce sugar-free chocolate. For example, some of the sweeteners have lower melting points and so conching temperatures will have to be lower; also, some pick up moisture causing an increase in viscosity during tempering and moulding.