Chocolate; it is the food most everyone loves. Unfortunately, it is also one of the foods that stains and never comes out. If you currently have a large chocolate stain in your carpeting, you may be tempted to use bleach, especially if the carpet is a light color anyway. However, you should never use bleach on carpet. Here are three reasons why.

You Are Trading One Stain for Another

Bleach will clean the chocolate out of your carpet, for sure, but you would be trading one type of stain for another. As you are aware, bleach on anything colored produces "bleach stains," which are not really stains but the destruction of the dyes and the fabric itself. A lot of carpet is synthetic, which is why stains are hard to remove. By using bleach on these stains, you are making the entire area white and removing the chocolate as well as the dye that was used to color the carpet fibers.

You Are Destroying the Synthetic Fibers of the Carpet

Bleach also destroys fibers. It eats holes in cotton and weakens synthetic fibers such that they just pull up and unravel. In the case of your carpet, you are probably dealing with nylon fibers. Bleach will break up the chemical makeup of the nylon fibers and eat straight down to the pile stitching of the carpet. 

Professional Carpet Cleaning Can Remove Chocolate but Not Bleach

Even if your toddler painted the entire foyer carpet with chocolate pudding, you should avoid bleach. Professional carpet cleaners can remove the chocolate stains, but they cannot remove bleach damage. They have tricks for removing organic stains, but nothing can reverse the damage that bleach causes.

Your Solution to the Chocolate Stain

Try to carefully clean as much of the chocolate out of the carpet as you can using soap, water, and paper towels or a sponge. Then call a professional carpet cleaning team to come and clean the spot. Because these pros charge by the room or hallway, you will get the entire room or hallway clean along with the chocolate stain removal.

Other food stains that typically do not come out can be removed at the same time, if you ask the pros to clean these spots as well. If you have several organic/food stains in multiple areas of your home, the pros can also charge you the "spot clean" price. This means that they will clean three or more difficult stains out of your carpeting for a flat rate.