Mars uses the best quality chocolate in their bars. Hershey is good, despite the sour milk overtones of their chocolate…I love Mounds, Almond Joy, and Heath. Nestlé is a disgrace–what used to be a respectable Swiss chocolate maker now peddling that awful vegetable oil-based fake chocolate in their bars.
Shout out to the lesser known Annabelle, still not gobbled up by one of the big corporations. They make three of my favorite bars: Look, Big Hunk, and Uno. (They’re also the maker of Rocky Road and Abba Zaba.)
I have mentioned this before, but a couple years ago we sent a small package of goodies to an elderly woman in Berlin.
She got the package and said “I really liked those W and W’s.”
It took us a minute to figure out she was looking at the M and M’s a bit differently than we looked at them.
I used to like Hershey’s chocolate. Then I lived in Germany and traveled through Europe for many years. Needless to say, after a decade of German and Swiss chocolates, Hershey’s didn’t really cut it for me when I returned to the States.
One last bit of trivia - when working at a boarding school in Switzerland, the kids would always congregate by Burger King in the city center. I was amazed to find out it was “illegal” to sell chocolate shakes there! They had Vanilla, Strawberry and Mocca. When I asked a Swiss teacher, he told me that Switzerland had stringent laws as to what can be considered “chocolate” and that Burger King’s so-called chocolate shakes didn’t come close to fitting those guidelines.
End of chocolate stories.
I voted for Mar’s - love those Snickers and W and W’s. Plus, they manufacture W and W’s here in Las Vegas, so be sure to visit their little museum on The Strip and get them in wild colors not normally seen.
Most of the great candy bars seem to be made by Mars-- Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, etc. Nestle has Kit-Kat, which is to their credit, but it’s about balanced out by Twix in the crunchy candy bar category. Plus, of course, M&Ms.
Mars is my favorite, too. Hershey’s has two big things in their favor, though: the aforementioned peanut butter cups (which are freakin’ amazing), and Symphony bars with toffee chips, which are my favorite way to eat milk chocolate.
The OP should have included Russell Stover, which is the third largest chocolate company in America. In addition to their name brand goods they also make Whitmans and Pangburns. Plus they invented the Eskimo Pie.
There is a reason for that. Hershey’s (at least the milk chocolate products) has soured milk in it. I never really noticed the flavor until a few months ago when I had a Hershey’s and said “hey, this has a slight bile, vomit-like flavor to it.” So I googled those search terms. Turns out, lots of people taste the vomit-undertones in Hershey’s, and it wasn’t an off-batch or just me, just the first time I noticed it. I don’t mind it, but there is that acidity and rancidness to a Hershey’s bar, and the soured milk is the reason.
