When I set out to taste and rank the best candy bars, I had to take into account that a lot of people would probably argue that all candy bars are good candy bars. Sure. A stick of chocolate filled with peanut butter or nougat or caramel or nuts (or all of the above) isn’t going to be bad, but there are things that make some candy bars the best candy bars in their respective categories.
When you’re taste testing dozens of candy bars—which, honestly, is less fun than it sounds—there are a few things to take into account. Is the coating-to-fillings ratio correct? Is the chocolate high quality and flavorful, or is it weak and waxy? Do the textures make taking another bite irresistible?
In multiple taste tests, we tasted a lot of candy bars, from Reese’s candy bars to nutty candy bars to the best white chocolate candy bars. We took into account ratios, flavor, and overall enjoyability. I’m sure this ranking will get a lot of people riled up (please, relax—there’s a lot going on right now), but here are our thoughts on the very best candy bars.
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- PayDay
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Ooh baby, were we dubious of this weird, naked candy bar. Where’s the chocolate, dudes? Well, if you’re sensitive to chocolate or just plain dislike it, Payday is a surprisingly delicious and satisfying option. Composed of lightly salted peanuts pressed into a sugary, chewy caramel core, this thing has Depression Era written all over it. But classics stick around for a reason, even the unlikely ones. This is the best candy bar for chocolate haters—but I think it will surprise chocolate lovers, too.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
- Zero
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I know this is upsetting, but some people genuinely believe white chocolate is superior to milk and dark chocolate. In fact, one of our taste testers was in that camp. “Maybe this is controversial, but I feel like a Zero bar is everything a Snickers bar should be,” she said. While I will never be a white chocolate supremacist, I have to admit that this combo of nutty nougat and white fudge is surprisingly delicious and so much less one-note than tried-and-true chocolate bars it beat out, like (regular) Snickers and Milky Way. Would it be better with milk chocolate? Maybe, but it’s the best white chocolate candy bar for sure.
Credit: Liv Averett / Ralphs
- Bubulubu
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Do you remember those raspberry jelly rings made by the same company that makes halva and tahini and whatnot? Okay, even if you don’t, you’re in for a pleasant surprise with this soft, jammy, tangy bar. Hailing from Mexico, Bubulubu combines a layer of fruity jelly and a layer of squishy marshmallow beneath a thin, crisp dark chocolatey coating. It’s quite sweet, but sweet is fun and so is this bar’s squiggly shape. We didn’t taste test a lot of candy bars with a fruity element, but this was the best candy bar of the ones we tried with a lil bit of fruity, jammy goodness.
Credit: Liv Averett / Ralphs
- Crunch
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We omitted straight-up plain chocolate bars from this tasting, but Crunch was as close as we got to a real basic bar. There’s something incredibly iconic about the taste of a Crunch bar, and the crispy, rice-y bite is still addictive after all these years. “It’s so simple, so wonderful, so retro,” Sporked editor-in-chief Justine Sterling said. “It’s just a very subtle, very lovely candy bar.” Hard agree. Crunch bar is one of the best candy bars—a classic for a reason.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Kinder Bueno
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This is another bar I’d absolutely snoozed on, but now I see the error in my ways. This delicate confection from Kinder has an excellent crispy crunch along with a smooth, creamy hazelnut filling. It’s delicious. “It’s so light and it’s the perfect amount of hazelnut,” Sporked’s Jordan Myrick said. “I also like that you can break it into little pieces [because it’s segmented].” The Bueno has been around since 1990, and I’m honestly embarrassed I’ve neglected it for this long.
Credit: Liv Averett / Target
- Hershey’s Ice Cream Shop Hazelnut
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No offense to people who like a plain ol’ Hershey’s bar, but when there are so many fun options on the market, a plain chocolate bar just doesn’t really stand a chance against the rest of what’s in the candy bar aisle. But this Hershey’s Ice Cream Shop Hazelnut bar is a different story. Taking a bite is like biting into a solid stick of Nutella, but even better because it’s dotted with bits of hazelnuts. This is the best candy bar on our list for hazelnut lovers and it’s good enough for a classic Hershey’s stan to rethink settling for a plain ol’ chocolate bar.
Credit: Liv Averett / Hershey’s
- Skor
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We put two toffee bars to the test—Skor and Heath—and while both were extremely delicious, we decided that Skor is the best candy bar with a crunchy toffee interior because of its deeper toffee flavor. Heath was a little crisper, but I personally detected a slightly weird flavor I didn’t love, while Skor—one of the more serious-looking candy bars in the aisle—absolutely nailed that sugary, buttery, molasses-y taste. If someone made a bar with Skor’s flavor and Heath’s texture, we’d be in heaven.
Credit: Liv Averett / Rite Aid
- Mounds
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Name a more iconic candy duo than Mounds and Almond Joy. We’ll wait. (Just kidding, I’m not really waiting.) Both of these beloved candy bars are filled with a sweet, coconut slime, but Almond Joy has a couple of whole almonds beneath its milk chocolate coating, while Mounds forgoes nuts and is just straight-up coconut drenched in dark chocolate. As the commercial once said, sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don’t. Can I tell you what I really feel like? A mashup! Please, please, please give me either a Mounds with almonds or a dark chocolate Almond Joy—whichever makes Mars feel best. Until this perfect candy bar materializes, we decided Mounds was the superior product because the dark chocolate just goes so much better with the sweet, sticky coconut filling. This is the best candy bar with a coconut filling and one of the best dark chocolate candy bars on this list, too.
- Kit Kat
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My colleague Justine has a very specific way of eating a Kit Kat bar: you nibble the ends, then eat the chocolate around the edges, and then disassemble it wafer by wafer with your teeth. As she wrote in a recent essay, “It prolongs the process, allowing me to savor each bite and continue eating a Kit Kat for much longer than someone who simply crunches down each stick in two bites flat.” Kit Kat is certainly good enough to savor. To me, Kit Kat is one of those candies that has such a distinct flavor to its chocolate coating that if you presented it in a totally different way, it would still be recognizable as Kit Kat chocolate. I also find it extremely amazing and appealing that there’s more chocolatey sweet stuff between the layers of wafer, but that the bars still aren’t indelibly cloying. Kit Kat is one of the best candy bars, no matter how you decide to eat it.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
- Chocolate Payday
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We’ve already established that Payday is the best candy bar for people who don’t like chocolate—but what about all the normies who do? Wouldn’t Payday want to accommodate them, too? Indeed, and that is where Chocolate Payday comes in. You get the same big clusters of roasty-toasty nuts and chewy, rich caramel, but the whole thing is enrobed in milk chocolate. Yep, they took one of the best candy bars and made it even better.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
- Twix
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Twix is a crunchy classic that totally holds up. Their iconic left bar vs. right bar marketing campaign is totally lost on me, but I’m incapable of resisting the combination of a crisp cookie and chewy caramel. “Their cookie is light enough that you don’t feel like you’re eating a whole cookie, but it’s also there enough that you feel like you’re eating a whole cookie,” one of our taste testers said. “It’s good, good time.” We also liked the chocolate coating-to-cookie ratio. Even though I’ll admit I typically prefer a soft-baked cookie, in this format, a crunchy cookie is just right. And left.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
- Butterfinger
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I’ve spent the bulk of my life avoiding Butterfinger because the crunchy peanut butter-flavored candy that makes up the bar’s interior is terribly prone to lodging itself deep in your molars once you get to chewing. I usually swear by anything and everything Bart Simpson promotes to me (skateboarding, juvenile delinquency, etc.), but this candy bar was an exception. Well, two bits of good news: the teeth problem isn’t as pronounced as I remember and this candy bar is just so delicious it kind of doesn’t matter anyway. This is the best candy bar to use as a Blizzard mix-in, but if you’re not a DQ girlie, this is just as good crumbled over vanilla ice cream.
Credit: Liv Averett / Walmart
- Snickers Peanut Butter
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The first time we ranked candy bars, regular Snickers didn’t make the cut. A bold move, we know, but I have my reasons (they’re too sweet, the nuts don’t taste roasty enough, etc.). Anyway, none of that matters now because in our second candy bar taste test we tried Peanut Butter Snickers and it absolutely rules. The peanut butter tastes great and makes way more of an impression than the peanuts make in the original bar. It also makes the texture of the caramel stand out a little more. If you’re a Snickers diehard but you want a lil upgrade, this is the best candy bar to try the next time you spot it in the checkout aisle.
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Reese’s Take 5
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We tried three Reese’s candy bars during our taste test: Reese’s Fast Break, Reese’s Outrageous!, and Reese’s Take 5. We thought that both the Outrageous! (that’s the one with Reese’s Pieces inside) and the Fast Break lacked crunch, but the Take 5 is just about as close as you can get to perfect without taking our top spot. There’s magic in the titular five ingredients: chocolate, pretzels, Reese’s signature peanut butter, peanuts, and caramel. This is an iconic candy bar and it came so, so close to being the best candy bar of them all, but we had a dark horse in the race…
Credit: Liv Averett / Ralphs
- Whatchamacallit
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I was only five years old in 1987, but I distinctly remember the commercial for this candy bar. Even with the line “Chewy, chocolatey, crunchy, Hersheeeeeys” periodically running through my head for 30-plus years, I don’t know that I ever picked up one of these guys from the grocery store checkout. What a dipshit! This bar really has it all: a thin, delicate coating of chocolate; a slightly salty, peanut buttery flavor; a little bit of a crisp-rice crunch; and chew from the luscious caramel within. I also really liked the shape—it’s kind of flat and wide rather than tall like a Snickers, if that makes sense. I don’t think anyone expected to like this sleeper hit as much as they did. Whatchamacallit is the best candy bar!
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
Best Candy Bar if You Hate Chocolate
Best White Chocolate Candy Bar
Best Fruity Candy Bar
Best Crunchy Candy Bar
Best Creamy Candy Bar
Best Hershey’s Bar
Best Candy Bar with Toffee
Best Candy Bar with Coconut
Best Wafer Bar
Best Candy Bar with Nuts
Best Cookie Bar
Best Ice Cream Mix-In
Best Snickers
Best Reese’s Candy Bar
Best of the Best
The rest of what we tasted: Idaho Spud, Fruity Pebbles Candy Bar, 100 Grand, Three Musketeers, Baby Ruth, Reese’s Outrageous, Reese’s Fast Break, Milky Way, Milky Way Midnight, Snickers, Charleston Chew, Heath, Toblerone, Mr. Goodbar
