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The World’s Best Chocolates

Its truffle counterpart is softer, with silky dulce de leche taking center stage. For a more modest treat, La Maison du Chocolat offers a Snacks & Treats collection, with hearty candy bars, rustic barks, chocolate-covered nuts, and candied orange peels. If you’re looking to really make a grand gesture, the brand’s Parisian Hatboxes — curated gift baskets filled with carefully selected boxes — will make a memorable statement. Its dairy-free options extend beyond the designated vegan bonbon collection. The Carré Origin box features individually wrapped, delicately thin tiles of divine chocolate sourced from around the world.

Akesson’s Organic Chocolate bars have won a multitude of awards and is regarded as one of the best craft chocolate bars on the market. Raaka is devoted to making uncommonly delicious chocolate that captures the brighter, bolder, and fruitier side of cacao. They make every bar from scratch with unroasted cacao beans, sourced from growers they trust and admire. The unique flavour of their unroasted Chocolate Candy Bars is part place, part process. They craft their bars in celebration of each cacao origin’s unique character.

Almost a decade after the last “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” movie hit theaters, Nestlé brought the Wonka Bar back in 2013 with two flavors. Originally, demand for the chocolate bars was high, with the brand raking in over £3 million a month in the U.K., but those sales quickly declined to just a third of that. It was not long before stores were selling the Wonka Bars at a discounted price, and Nestlé eventually discontinued the candy bars altogether. “Novelty is by its nature often short-term and Nestlé has reintroduced the Wonka brand a number of times,” the company said in a statement, per The Grocer.

Luckily, the brand does offer a chocolate-covered option, so if you’re a big fan of those salty peanuts, it may be worth checking out. As the only candy bar on this list that doesn’t contain any chocolate, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Payday is near the bottom of the ranking. A candy bar sans chocolate is just sad, to be frank, and it’s not like you’re getting amazing quality ingredients with the stuff that is included. The caramel-y center is tough and sticky, making it slightly hard to chew and leaving an unpleasant residue on your molars.

The milk chocolate flavor is sweet but not overwhelming, and every bite has plenty of crunchy hazelnut morsels. Even the texture is soft and aerated like the brand’s classic truffle. However, its top selling point is also its main limitation. Although I enjoy hazelnut flavor in chocolate, it’s one that can lose its charm after several bites, and that’s what happened here.

Our flavored chocolate bars are crafted using real ingredients, not artificial flavoring. They contain no artificial colors or flavors, and are made with real cocoa butter and natural ingredients. Each bar undergoes a complete chocolate-making process, including 72-hour conching, to achieve exceptional texture and flavor.

This year I have been able to organise my materials and spend time on the design, and to enjoy the process lot more. Ten Golden Tickets were hidden in the bars and bags of Wonka Exceptionals. Later, more Exceptionals flavors were added, like Wonka Triple Dazzle Caramel and Wonka Fantabulous Fudge. A Nestlé factory in Europe started making Wonka Bars with the flavors and wrappers from the 2005 movie. These included Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, Nutty Crunch Surprise (which didn’t actually have nuts), and Triple Dazzle Caramel. The company that made them was called the Willy Wonka Chocolate Bars Wonka Candy Company, which was part of Nestlé.

Nestlé Japan also released a toy truck containing these bars. However, they have since been discontinued after the sale to Ferrero. The wrappers of the 1971 version are brown with an orange and pink border with a top hat over the “W” in Wonka, similar to the film’s logo, and the chocolate bars resemble Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars.

Most of the chocolate bars I reviewed have less than 10 grams of sugar per serving, with a standout exception being the Ritter Sport Alpine Milk Chocolate, with 17 grams. Although it’s not a requirement that chocolatiers name their cacao’s country of origin and sourcing details, many choose to. The Raaka Pink Sea Salt, for example, is entirely sourced from a cacao farm in a bird sanctuary in the Dominican Republic.

You’d be hard-pressed to find that information on a conventional chocolate bar. Who among us hasn’t broken into the emergency stash of baking chips once a chocolate craving hits? For that reason, I ate 26 chocolate bars on the hunt for the very best. (You’re welcome.) What makes for the best high-quality chocolate bar, however, depends on your preferences. There are milk chocolate lovers, extra dark chocolate purists, and fans of flavored chocolate.

The best dark chocolate bar is the Beyond Good 70% Pure Dark. It’s complex but approachable and melts in your mouth beautifully. Milk chocolate lovers will swoon for the sweet and creamy Ritter Sport Alpine Milk Chocolate. These luscious chocolate bars are made with 100% cocoa butter and high quality non-GMO Fair Trade Certified coverture chocolate. Giant chocolatier Godiva leans into its nearly century-old Belgian roots to support an image of fancy chocolate.