british chocolate

British friends and people online had told me American chocolate was awful and British chocolate was the best. In November 2021, I decided to test that claim by eating a ridiculous amount of chocolate bought here. I was Canadian, I had been living in the UK for nearly six years, and I was ready to have opinions.

This was a taste test, not a careful study of where every bar was manufactured. I wanted to know which ones I enjoyed. By the end, plain Cadbury Dairy Milk was my favourite. I would still choose Hershey’s over a Bounty, though. The coconut and I were not going to become friends.

Dairy Milk kept setting the standard

Galaxy Smooth Milk was very good, but I preferred Cadbury. Once I tasted Dairy Milk, it became the bar I kept comparing everything else with. I found it smooth, rich and creamy, and I was not sure the other chocolates could beat it. I liked the simple, straight chocolate without needing lots of additions.

Alanna holding a purple chocolate wrapper above a table covered with chocolate bars and packets
Working through the chocolate I had bought for the taste test. There was rather a lot of it.

Yorkie was another solid milk-chocolate bar I enjoyed. It was chunky and delicious. Better than Dairy Milk? No, but close. That became a familiar answer during the tasting: I could like a chocolate very much and still want the plain Cadbury bar more.

Milkybar also got a positive response. Its thin white chocolate reminded me of a favourite childhood bar from Canada, although that one had little chocolate specks in it. I could not remember the name. I liked how thin the Milkybar was and the way it crunched when I bit into it. I would happily have one again.

Bubbles, wafers and biscuit bits

I tried both peppermint Aero and the regular chocolate version. The peppermint one was top notch, and the regular one was creamy, airy and bubbly. Asked to choose between them, I did not really have a preference. I liked both. That was a strong start to a table full of chocolate.

Wispa was tasty too, but I preferred Aero for the bubbles. To me, Aero seemed more bubbly. That was the kind of highly sophisticated comparison I was making by this point, while noticing that it was around eleven o’clock and calling the whole thing brunch.

Crunch was another way to win me over. Munchies had a crisp biscuit centre inside their chocolate and caramel, which I really liked. I remembered enjoying them in one of my old taste-test videos, but they were not as high in my ranking now. Dairy Milk had given them competition.

Maltesers were delicious and had a good crunch, even though they still did not beat Dairy Milk for me. KitKat Chunky was another favourite: I liked its extra chunk and found the chocolate smooth and creamy. Time Out Wafer brought together two things I loved, Cadbury chocolate and wafer. That one was fabulous.

The bars I would leave behind

Bounty was never likely to win because I usually avoided coconut. Tasting it did not change my mind. I had forgotten how much coconut was inside, and I would take Hershey’s over it. That was a preference about this particular bar, even while other British chocolates were doing very well.

Mars did not work for me either. I disliked the soft nougat and caramel, which I found too sickly. I wanted a wafer, biscuit, nuts or some other crunch. At the end, I put Mars and Bounty at the bottom because their soft, mushy insides were not what I wanted.

Adding crunch did not automatically make a bar a winner, though. I liked the biscuit and crisp cereal in Toffee Crisp more, but the chocolate itself was just all right to me. I was surprised by how little I cared about it. Lion seemed to have more going on, but by that stage I was also reaching the limit of how much chocolate I could face.

My mind was changed, with exceptions

I finished by conceding that I preferred the British chocolate I had been trying. Dairy Milk was the clearest reason: creamy, tasty and the bar I would have kept eating if I had not already eaten far too much. I am usually more of a crisps person, so this had been an unusually large amount of chocolate for me.

There were still more things on the table, but I stopped because I felt close to being sick. The rest would have to wait for another video. My conclusion was not that every British bar beat every American one. Dairy Milk won my tasting, and Bounty and Mars could stay at the bottom.

Watch my chocolate taste test.