Dairy Free Hot Chocolate Mix (Gluten Free)

Cozy up this winter with our instant dairy free hot chocolate mix! It’s easy to assemble and makes great homemade gifts. It’s not only dairy free, but it’s also gluten free and soy free.

If it’s snowy and cold where you are, our dairy free hot chocolate mix is the perfect way to warm up! Our allergy friendly cocoa mix is super easy to make and also makes great homemade gifts as well for friends or loved ones with food allergies. 

The awesome thing about this recipe is that there are no dairy free milk or creamer powders in it, so it uses ingredients you likely already have in your pantry. And you can use any favorite dairy free milk to make your hot cocoa, making it really easy to fit this to multiple food allergies. 

You can also adjust how dark you want your hot chocolate by using more or less mix. I found that 1 to 2 Tablespoons of this mix is perfect for 1 cup of dairy free milk, but if you like dark cocoa, you can add more.

This recipe is our version of the hot cocoa recipe that was often featured on the back of cocoa powder containers. It’s a classic that we’ve tweaked a bit to fit our

Our cocoa mix is:

• Dairy free and vegan
• Gluten free
• Soy free
• Peanut and tree nut free
• Can be made paleo, low sugar, or sugar free

How to make dairy free hot chocolate mix

This recipe is incredibly easy to make: simply mix all the ingredients together and store in an airtight container. Super simple!

Since this recipe mixes with hot dairy free milk and doesn’t use any dairy free milk powders, everything is a pantry staple and won’t require purchasing any unusual ingredients. 

Back when I originally posted this recipe in 2015, I used coconut sugar instead of unbleached cane sugar, but I recently updated this recipe using my favorite Zulka morena sugar (I use that in just about everything except candy making).

I also updated this recipe with dehydrated mini marshmallows, which are completely optional but so fun to add. It makes this recipe just like dairy free Swiss Miss cocoa mix. If you can’t find mini marshmallows, you can completely skip them. 

The vanilla powder is also optional for this cocoa mix. It can be hard to find (at least it’s hard for me to find in our town), so it’s totally optional in this recipe. If you can’t find it, just add a splash of vanilla to your hot cocoa once it’s made if you want that nice hit of vanilla.

How to make this cocoa mix low sugar or sugar free

I originally posted this recipe back in 2015, my original recipe used coconut sugar and Stevia in the Raw. I updated this recipe recently and used unbleached cane sugar, but you can still make this lower in sugar by replacing half the sugar with powdered/baking stevia or using a granulated erythritol, xylitol, or allulose sweetener. 

If you’d like to make this completely sugar free, swap all of the sugar for the granulated sweetener and skip the mini marshmallows!

If you’d like a more natural and paleo hot cocoa mix, you can use granulated coconut sugar in place of the cane sugar like we did in our older recipe. It will have a deeper flavor, similar to brown sugar or molasses, but if you love that flavor it will add another flavor dimension!

Update: this recipe is great if you are adding it to hot non-dairy milk, but if you want to just add this to hot water, you can add some non-dairy creamer to this mix. I’d use about 1/2 cup non-dairy creamer in this recipe (we love the Simple Truth non-dairy creamer).

Here are a few of our older images for this recipe from 2015: