Australian supermarket milk chocolate taste test: the winner costs $3.99, the worst is one of the most expensive | Australian food and drink | The Guardian

One is ‘like biting into a candle’; another tastes like ‘soy milk from 2002’. In a blind taste test of 20 milk chocolates, Nicholas Jordan and friends have their own block party – and are shocked by the results

Usually when I host a taste test the products are blind for everyone but me – I distribute the samples to the other tasters and that usually involves me seeing what the brand is. That’s fine, I tell myself: I’m a free-thinking, rational, analytical mind who can tune out any biases or marketing. Well, that’s what I thought, until a taste test of 20 blocks of supermarket milk chocolate proved I’m not only fickle but apparently heavily biased too.

I was joined by 10 friends who, like me, scored the chocolates based on texture and taste. Because many supermarket chocolates have distinct shapes or names carved into them, the other reviewers closed their eyes when I gave out each sample – although I always knew the brand.

Sometimes we’d try an expensive brand and I’d find myself looking for positives. When I tasted an unusual flavour, I’d think: “Wow, the origin characteristics of the beans!” Then I’d taste a cheap brand with an unusual flavour and imagine synthetic additives. Meanwhile, the other reviewers, having no idea what they were eating, would write the opposite on their scorecards.

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At the end of the taste test, we did a brand reveal. The reviewers were shocked by the results: they had given some of their favourite brands middling scores, eviscerated several expensive brands and announced a winner that sells for $3.99 at Aldi, a chocolate few had ever thought to pick off the shelf, probably because of the branding.

The results might surprise, but if you can find the mental space to confront your own brand loyalty, you could be eating tastier – or at least cheaper – chocolate.

Note: we also tried Up-Up, a B Corp certified chocolate brand that was very close to winning, but it was cut from the final results because it is difficult to find in supermarkets nationally. Nine products – mostly vegan and sugar-free products – were cut from the final results because they were real shockers.

Choceur Milk, 200g, $3.99 ($2 per 100g), available at Aldi

Score: 8/10

Before the taste test, I reminded myself this wasn’t the domain for snobbery – this is supermarket milk chocolate we’re talking about. Instead of seeking single-origin nuance and bean-to-bar depth of flavour, I remembered how I felt as a kid reading about Charlie Bucket eating a chocolate bar once a year on his birthday, and how uncomplicated and overwhelmingly delicious it must have been. This was the closest to that feeling. The reviewers who agreed said it was well balanced and comforting. Others described it as malty, creamy and dense. “HOW MILK CHOC SHOULD TASTE,” wrote one taster – which says a lot about all the other chocolates we tasted.

Koko Black Moreish Milk, 90g, $12.99 ($14.43 per 100g), available at select supermarkets

Score: 7.5/10

I would bet on Choceur to be liked by the most people but I’d pick Koko Black if I needed to impress a snob. As a part-time snob, I can tell you we like to think we’re experiencing something special or different. While this doesn’t taste particularly special, it does taste different: it’s light on cocoa and instead relies on a generous amount of “natural vanilla”. One reviewer wrote it was like “choc-chip ice-cream, light on the tongue but powerful flavour”; another said it was milky but with “an interesting range like dark choc, has some raisin notes”. Where it really shines is the texture: it has the snap of fridge choc but without any compromise on meltiness.

Ritter Sport Alpine Milk Chocolate, 100g, $4.69, available at select supermarkets

Score: 7.5/10

This is in the Choceur school of crowd pleasers, but if Choceur is a friend who laughs at your jokes and smiles as you talk but never says much, then Ritter is the same friend ten years down the track – they have a little more confidence and character. That character comes in the form of hazelnut paste, a delicious addition that almost made me rule out the chocolate – this is a plain milk chocolate taste test after all – until I noticed almost every other chocolate had other flavours added too. I’d take a hint of hazelnut over imitation caramel any day of the week.

Whittaker’s 33% Cocoa Creamy Milk, 250g, $8 ($3.20 per 100g), available at major supermarkets

Score: 7/10

When you’ve consumed more than a dozen samples of chocolate, the smallest difference in flavour can feel like a chasm. When the tasters tried this, they wowed, yelled and looked at each other as if they’d just come across a million dollars covered in boogers. They chewed in silence for a moment, until one reviewer said: “It tastes like the burnt underside of a choc-chip cookie.” It was a divisive flavour: some disparaged the caramel flavour and bitter aftertaste and thought it was all a bit much. “Trying to be pretentious/is pretentious,” one wrote. But the majority loved it. As one reviewer wrote: “Cake for adults.”

Tony’s Chocolonely Milk Chocolate, 180g, $8.30 ($4.61 per 100g), available at major supermarkets

Score: 7/10

This was the only chocolate of the day not to contain any extra flavours – it’s just sugar, milk powder, cocoa (solids and butter) and lecithin (a common chocolate additive used to bind ingredients). But what does that combination taste like? Not far from what you’d think – malty, milky, Milo-y and cocoa-y. If we scored only on taste this would have placed higher, but it was let down by the texture. “Grippy and not that silky,” described one reviewer; “like biting into a candle,” wrote another.

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Dairy Fine Milk Chocolate, 180g, $2.59 ($1.44 per 100g), available at Aldi

Score: 6.5/10

One taster described this as “extremely hefty”, and they weren’t just talking about the weight. This chocolate is so pumped with sugar (of all the tested products, it has the highest sugar content per 100g), milk solids (unusually, there’s almost as much milk solids as cocoa solids) and “natural flavour” – which tastes like caramel – that it tastes more like a Fantale. Like one reviewer wrote, “It’s not a whole block in front of (insert trash TV) kind of chocolate” – but that’s exactly what you want milk chocolate to be. The only times I’ve eaten just a single square of chocolate were when it was rationed due to short supply. But after one piece of this, I was done.

Moser Roth Finest Milk, 125g, $3.69 ($2.95 per 100g), available at Aldi

Score: 6/10

I think of most Aldi brands as imitators of famous brands, but like Choceur and Dairy Fine, this has its own character that is difficult to describe and appreciate, like the art produced in high schools – it’s trying to be different and interesting but is executed with poor artistic vision. Some described it as hazelnutty or like khoya and other kinds of cooked milk. Others said it was like “astronaut choc” or “soy milk from 2002”. I wouldn’t say it was divisive – there wasn’t a great range in scores – just confusingly average.

Lindt Extra Creamy Milk, 100g, $6.50, available from major supermarkets

Score: 6/10

When I was younger I would respond to any crush with overblown enthusiasm. When you lack confidence, you overcompensate. This chocolate is doing the same. “Enliven your senses with the ultimate chocolate luxury,” the packaging says. What is luxurious about it: the melty texture that tiptoes the line between creamy and oily, the jacked-up caramel flavour or the big whack of sweetness? One reviewer wrote: “Everything I like in milk chocolate but just slightly too much volume on all counts.”

Godiva Milk Chocolate, 90g, $9.50 ($10.56 per 100g), available at select supermarkets

Score: 6/10

You probably don’t expect a plain milk chocolate to be described as chewy, but here we are. I still don’t know what to think of it (my scorecard has a “?” in the texture box) but others were damning. “Very sticky and mouth coating. Almost rubbery,” one wrote. The comments about the taste were all over the place – some said it was coconutty and others likened it to cereal. Confusingly, one reviewer gave it eight out of 10 and wrote that it was classic, with “Belgian quality/vibes”.

Cadbury Dairy Milk Milk Chocolate, 180g, $6.00 ($3.33 per 100g), available at major supermarkets

Score: 5/10

I’m sure Cadbury used to be respectable, but sadly that era feels long gone. Eating this, all I can imagine are some poorly paid flavour engineers standing over a vat of melted chocolate who, having just been told by upper management they need to double the volume of production, start looking around for something, anything, they can add to the vat to bulk it out, but find only the family-size packet of banana lollies they ordered for the Christmas party. A “lolly hiding in a chocolate”, reviewers wrote; “tastes like yellow Clinkers”. Cadbury’s Velvet range fared slightly better (5.5 out of 10) but recommending that is like telling someone to search for luxury furniture on Temu.

Simón Coll Xocolaters Xocolata Amb Llet, 85g, $7.99 ($9.40 per 100g), available at select supermarkets

Score: 4/10

When the taste test was finished, the other reviewers took home most of the high-scoring brands, leaving me with a table of half-eaten packs of chocolate that I’d just spent an hour criticising. My partner came home to that stack and instantly went for this brand. “Those are the unwanted ones, you don’t want to eat that,” I told her, but she pointed at the packet and questioned how it could be so bad when it looked so beautiful. I don’t know, Alice. I’m unsure how a chocolate that costs double most of the others can have such minimal cocoa flavour and instead tastes like “plasticine” and “oil”.