The European Union has failed to resolve a longstanding impasse over how to define chocolate after the European Commission objected to a hard-fought compromise that most EU states supported.
It would have also allowed Irish and British manufacturers to market milk chocolate under the name "family milk chocolate" - to distinguish it from the continental version, which has lower milk content.
The Commission opposed language that would have diluted its powers by requiring EU governments and the European parliament to agree technical changes to rules governing chocolate once it was adopted, EU officials said.
Most EU governments had rallied around a compromise to the 25-year-old dispute, which has inflamed passions in both big chocolate-making countries such as Belgium and cocoa-producing states. The text would have allowed chocolate products to include 5 per cent of certain non-cocoa vegetable fats, as long as they were clearly labelled and would have meant that Irish and British manufactures could have used the family milk chocolate name.
Only Belgium and the Netherlands, which ban the use of such "cocoa butter equivalents", were set to vote against the text, with Luxembourg abstaining, officials said.
That would normally have allowed the measure to be adopted since most EU legislation can pass on qualified majorities. But EU states can defy the Commission only by unanimous vote.
The outgoing Industry Commissioner, Mr Martin Bangemann, told the ministers he was unwilling to accept a text that could set a dangerous precedent for other EU legislation, especially as one of his last acts, his spokesman, Mr Jochen Kubosch, told reporters.
Mr Bangemann and his 19 fellow commissioners resigned in March in a mismanagement scandal and are waiting to be replaced.
The Commission's original proposal would have allowed the Commission, in consultation with EU governments, to make technical adjustments to the legislation if needed - for example, to annexe listing the names, definitions and characteristics of different cocoa and chocolate products.
The proposal will now be passed on to Finland, which takes over the EU presidency in July.
The compromise text would have allowed six specific tropical fats to be used instead of cocoa butter: illipe, palm oil, sal, shea, kokum gurgi, mango kernel. Coconut oil could be used only in chocolate used to make ice cream. Products containing substitutes would have to include a prominent label saying "contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter".
The EU has been attempting for years to draw up common rules on chocolate to ensure that it can be sold freely throughout the 15-member bloc.
A 1973 directive bars the use of cocoa-butter substitutes, but Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal and Sweden won exemptions when they joined the union.
