What’s The Best Chocolate In Australia?

Here at Mum Knows Best we love to bring you reviews and reports of all the best things to help you to make smart decisions when you’re shopping.

But we always like to test out the products that we recommend, so when this project came across my desk – to find the best chocolate in Australia – I knew I would easily be able to find a band of volunteers to taste, test and help me to decide which is the best chocolate in Australia.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it, right? Sure, none of them lined up to help me test and demonstrate KOH cleaning products or to review dishwashers, but funnily enough, they were all happy to help in my chocolate taste tests!

So my team (teenagers and husband) and I set out to taste and compare a range of brands of chocolate commonly available here in Australia. From some inexpensive supermarket blocks through to some more expensive/luxurious brands like Haigh’s, here are our findings in our quest for the best chocolate.

We began with 10 different blocks of chocolate – a milk and a dark version of five different brands. I purchased the Lindt, Cadbury and Darrell Lea blocks of chocolate from the supermarket, but the Haigh’s and the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie blocks had to be purchased from each of their own shops.

Luckily it was no hardship for me to make a couple of trips to a couple of different chocolate shops! It’s tough but I’m happy to help! 

The chocolate we tested was from:

Lindt

Cadbury

Darrell Lea

Yarra Valley Chocolaterie

And Haigh’s

First of all I need to make a confession. When I bought what I thought were blocks of Lindt chocolate from the supermarket, it turns out I actually bought filled Lindt chocolate pieces shaped to look like a block of chocolate.

This means that each piece of Lindt chocolate was actually filled with a similar filling to their traditional Lindt chocolate balls. So, it may not have been quite the even playing field I was going for.

I was trying to get us all to assess the taste and texture of each chocolate brand and wasn’t counting on any of them having any sort of filling.

Regardless, we soldiered on as we had all prepared ourselves for chocolate testing and didn’t want to delay the event until I could buy a different type of chocolate. So, keep in mind our results may be somewhat skewed due to the filled centres of the Lindt blocks.

Before we began our chocolate tasting process, I read up a bit on the best way to cleanse your palate between tastes. Eating ten different chocolates in a row, it was going to be hard to distinguish one from another. The suggestions I read about for palate cleansing were:

• Drink water
• Drink fizzy/sparkling water
• Eat a dry cracker
• Eat a piece of apple

We all agreed that the quickest and easiest method would be to drink some water between each taste to refresh and reset our pallets so we armed ourselves with a glass of water each. 

Without showing any of my fellow testers I had put some sample pieces of each different chocolate into separate bowls and then I had ordered them in random order for testing.

While we are far from chocolate connoisseurs, some of the brands were fairly easy for my fellow testers to pick due to their shape and/or markings on the chocolate, but we tried to not notice the brand where possible and just focus on the taste and texture of each piece of chocolate.

We tasted each piece together, gave our thoughts on each piece and then each person ranked the chocolate. We then each had a drink of water, tried the next piece and ranked each in comparison. Some people went back for seconds (and thirds) to confirm their own personal rankings before adding them to the group scores.

What we were ultimately left with was each person came up with their own ranking so each chocolate was ranked from 1-10. We then combined our 5 individual results to come up with our ultimate list of the best chocolate in Australia.

So, What’s The Best Chocolate In Australia?

The winner of our chocolate tasting experiment was Lindt Milk Chocolate! But do remember that this was not plain chocolate as I had planned, but had a creamy filling which was delicious!

Here are our results in table format. The score is essentially out of a possible 50 so you can see that Lindt milk chocolate with a score of 48, did exceptionally well!

So Lindt Milk Chocolate was the clear winner for us. Comments when tasting this chocolate included ‘smells delicious’ and ‘melts beautifully’. If you like a sweet, smooth textured and good at melting in the mouth chocolate, we’d suggest you give it a try.

Coming in at number two was Haigh’s dark chocolate which has a deep, rich, chocolatey taste. This was actually my personal winner as I prefer the more chocolate-y taste of a good dark chocolate. The Lindt is undeniably delicious but is a little bit sweeter than I prefer.

Number three proved the popularity of Lindt in our family with people again commenting on how well it melts in the mouth as well as offering a very smooth texture and a nice chocolatey bitterness.

Number four was a tie between good old Cadbury Dairy Milk and Haigh’s Milk Chocolate. I’m a huge fan of both of these chocolates – Cadbury is a staple in my pantry. Both offered a smooth and creamy texture and a nice melting experience.

Worth noting though that, especially when it’s on special in the supermarket, Cadbury is significantly less expensive to buy than Haigh’s so, as much as I love some Haigh’s chocolate, if you’re at all budget conscious, you’d do just as well to stick to Cadbury!

Cadbury Old Gold followed on in fifth position – another staple in my house, in fact probably my go-to chocolate as I personally prefer dark over milk – chocolate taste over sweetness is my preference.

In sixth place was another tie this time between Yarra Valley Milk Chocolate and Darrell Lea Dark Chocolate. The aspects that probably brought these chocolates to the bottom of the list were for the Darrell Lea Dark, testers felt that ‘it doesn’t melt’, ‘not creamy enough’ and ‘tastes fatty’. Meanwhile the Yarra Valley milk chocolate, while smooth in texture, was just ‘too sweet’.  

In seventh position was Darrell Lea milk chocolate. This one surprised me a bit because Darrell Lea milk chocolate bullets are one of my favourite foods in the world and are, yet again, another staple in my house!

I would assume that the same chocolate that they use on their licorice bullets is the one they sell in block form but, unfortunately for our testing team, this one just did not hit the spot. Testers commented that although it smelt good it did not have a smooth texture.

In final position, the bottom of our list, we have Yarra Valley Dark Chocolate. Our testers unfortunately felt that this chocolate was ‘crumbly’ and had ‘no taste’ or even ‘not chocolate’. So, while I can recommend a trip to the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie to watch the chocolates being made, I probably wouldn’t recommend their chocolate over the other delicious chocolates we tested here.            

The thing to remember here though is, chocolate tastes are subjective, everybody has different likes and tastes. So, even within my family, while we did come up with a winner, the winning chocolate was not the top of my personal list (it came second on my list). You and your family may come up with something completely different.

So, you can take our word for it that Lindt is the best chocolate in Australia, or, and I highly recommend this, you can do your only chocolate taste testing amongst your friends and family – it’s so much fun to do! See if you come up with a different answer to us.

You might also like to add some other brands to the mix. I had originally planned to test some Aldi chocolate too but didn’t manage to fit an Aldi trip in before the testing day. 

Chocolate taste testing is a lot of fun, give it a go yourselves and see if you can discover the best chocolate in Australia (or wherever you are in the world).