It’s June, which means that we have the longest day of the year to look forward to this month. And after that, it’s all downhill until we descend into complete darkness. You may occasionally wonder, what’s it all for? Is it possible to truly attain intimacy with another person given the loneliness of our individual bodies?
At times like this, all you can do is try your best, and eat a lot of candy. Fortunately, I’m here with the unassailable, infallibly factual and 100 percent correct L.A. Times Candy Bar Power Rankings. I have judged every candy bar in known existence (with the exception of ones I deemed unworthy or could not find at CVS, or both) and ranked them by the metrics of 1) taste and 2) attractiveness of the wrapper.
1) Take 5
Shut it down. We’ve got a winner. We already loved Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” the jazz piece in 5/4 time that is really, really hard to whistle. We’ve now got the unrelated Take 5 candy bar, which manages to crack the candy bar code with the addition of pretzel.
Pretzels! Of course! The simple, modest pretzel does so much by adding salt and texture, two essential components to a great candy bar. The rest of the bar combines seemingly every other good thing you find in other bars: chocolate, caramel, peanut butter and peanuts. It’s an unbeatable combination.
Wrapper ranking: 24
2) Butterfinger
Remember the good old days when our favorite TV shows used to sell out? Not the sneaky sponsored content of today but, like, very obviously, shamelessly sell out? Bart Simpson shilling for Butterfinger created some pretty good commercials back in the ’80s and ’90s, such as when he illustrated for his friend Milhouse the four food groups: sandwich group, cow group (milk), jungle group (banana), and Butterfinger group.
Butterfinger remains one of the best candy bars out there: the thin, brittle candy layers taste strongly of peanut butter, and there’s a great saltiness to the bar.
Wrapper ranking: 16
3) Payday
This thing is salty. And for that reason, and nearly that reason alone, the Payday bar is extremely good. Why more companies haven’t keyed in to the magical Salt + Sweet = Good equation is confounding, but it makes it all the more satisfying when you find a bar as good as a Payday, a caramel core rolled in salted peanuts. The chewy center can get to be a little much, but it’s a small price to pay for this candy bar par excellence.
Wrapper ranking: 9
4) Snickers
Snickers, introduced in 1930, has a done a great job with its marketing over the years, etching the slogan “Packed with peanuts, Snickers really satisfies” into my television-addled brain at a very young age. They successfully convinced a generation that candy is actually a good thing to eat when you’re hungry and that it may even fuel your Olympics and discus-throwing aspirations.
But peanuts, caramel and nougat are a combination that’s hard to argue with.
Wrapper ranking: 7
5) Toblerone
Let’s give it up for the Toblerone bar: that thing we buy at the airport duty-free store when we have some euros left over from a trip, but not enough for it to be worth exchanging them back to dollars. Toblerone, while still made in Switzerland, is owned by the Illinois-based Mondelez International, formerly known as Kraft Foods.
The Toblerone has an amusing shape — three-dimensional triangles joined together — and the chocolate certainly tastes richer and milkier than your average U.S. bar. I like the sticky nougat chunks dotted throughout.
Wrapper ranking: 11
6) Twix
The Twix candy bar owes an incalculable debt of gratitude to the Swiss one-hit wonders Yello (and I might be stretching the definition of “hit” in this case), who created the song “Oh Yeah,” featured in the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” as well as several late-’80s Twix commercials.
Twix isn’t salty enough but is still one of the better candy bars due to the crunch of its bottom cookie layer. A crisp, crumbly cookie is a perfect foil to sticky caramel.
Wrapper ranking: 18
7) Baby Ruth
It’s been posited that the Baby Ruth candy bar, introduced in 1921, was named after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter, Ruth, and not baseball legend Babe Ruth, who was in the prime of his career when the candy hit the market. This makes literally no sense, as Babe Ruth was hugely popular at the time, and Ruth Cleveland had been dead for 17 years when the bar came out. But the courts bought it: Babe Ruth sued the candy maker and lost.
Fortunately, the quality of the candy bar is less debatable. It’s a good candy bar. Peanuts riddle the outside of the solid nougat core (although they’re unsalted), which provides for a crunchy, satisfying snacking experience.
Wrapper ranking: 17
8) Whatchamacallit
First and foremost, I give extreme graphic-design-is-my-passion props to the Whatchamacallit label, which combines Lichtensteinian dots, with a cheesy font and wonderfully bad color scheme.
As a bonus, the candy bar is pretty good too, the key being the inclusion of peanut butter-flavored crisped rice, which adds flavor and texture to the chocolate and caramel. But really, I’m all about the aesthetic, embodied in this great late ’80s commercial which easily could have been a Bananarama video.
Wrapper ranking: 1
9) Charleston Chew
Fun fact: The Charleston Chew is not, in fact, named after a city in South Carolina but rather the Charleston dance, which was apparently a thing when this candy bar debuted in the 1920s. Why did we stop naming food after dance fads? (It’s important to note that the dance-to-candy-brand journey has worked the other way around, too. See: Laffy Taffy.)
The Charleston Chew is mushy and sticky on its own, like a sad Tootsie Roll. It works exponentially better when frozen. A cold Charleston becomes light and crunchy, nearly meringue-like, and then yields to a pleasant chewiness.
Wrapper ranking: 5
10) Oh Henry!
Sue Ellen Mischke, the “braless wonder” from Seinfeld and heiress to the Oh Henry! candy bar fortune, may not have used her money on undergarments but certainly had ancestors with good taste in candy.
The Oh Henry! is a sleeper hit: The layers of caramel and nougat might lead you to think it’s going to be another soft, spineless Mars- or Milky Way-like experience, but there are actually peanuts embedded in the caramel, as with a Snickers. The Oh Henry! has a thicker caramel layer, whereas the Snickers has a thicker nougat layer. I slightly prefer the latter, but both are tasty.
Wrapper ranking: 6
11) Cadbury Flake
It’s a little unfair to include a Cadbury Flake, I suppose, because the chocolate standards in the U.K. are so much higher than here in America. But it was important to include a nod to our English allies, especially seeing as they have far superior mass-produced chocolate than we do.
The Cadbury Flake tastes like actual chocolate. The flakiness is a little messy and annoying, and the chocolate a bit grainy, but there’s a milky, chocolatey creaminess present in a way it isn’t in nearly all the mass-market American products.
Wrapper ranking: 22
12) Kit Kat
I feel the same way about Kit Kat bars as I feel about the Who. I like, but I do not love. I respect the craft, but I rarely put it on in the car. I don’t seek out Kit Kats, but sometimes I’ll eat one if it’s there and think, “Yeah, that’s not so bad.”
The wafer matters. The layers give a good texture and crunch to the Kit Kat, and it’s nice that they’re very easy to share. This does not include the hundreds of different Kit Kat flavors available in Japan, some of which (canteloupe, sake) are really outstanding.
Wrapper ranking: 19
13) Skor and Heath
Hershey’s introduced the Skor bar back when it competed with the Heath bar. Now the company owns Heath and Skor but still puts out both for some reason. Both bars are thin slabs of toffee coated in chocolate. They are virtually identical, but Skor tastes slightly butterier and might be a tiny bit better. Heath, however, has the superior name.
Wrapper ranking: 8
14) Almond Joy
Almond Joy and Mounds are similar — so much so that both products used to be advertised in the same commercials with the tagline, “Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.”
Almond Joy and Mounds are cult favorites — candy bars with small but rabid followings. You’re either a coconut person or you aren’t. And if you are, you really are. Almond Joy is clearly the superior item of the two, because who doesn’t like almonds?
Wrapper ranking: 21
15) Hershey’s Special Dark
While not nearly as good as a quality European dark chocolate, this does actually taste like chocolate, unlike most of Hershey’s products. With a higher cocoa percentage than its milk chocolate counterpart, this has a whisper of the deepness and complexity you’ll find in a good dark chocolate. But it still has that Hershey’s characteristic sourness.
Wrapper ranking: 14
16) Chunky
The Chunky bar has always confused me, even as a child, but I respect it for doing its own thing. The Chunky bar is the kid in high school who was an A/V supergeek but so comfortable and guileless about it, it was cool. Why is this candy bar square? Who knows. Who puts raisins in a candy bar? Chunky does.
The peanut and raisin mixture gives it a trail mix feel, and the entire bar tastes vaguely rum raisin-like or like a freshly opened package of cigarettes.
Wrapper ranking: 15
17) Mounds
This is Almond Joy without the almonds and with dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate. The coconut is meaty in the Mounds bar, and while too sticky and sweet, it’s hard to fault the candy makers — the alternative would be to have drier, flakier coconut, which wouldn’t really work. The chocolate is a nice touch.
Wrapper ranking: 20
18) Bounty
A Bounty bar is virtually identical to the above Mounds bar so, like Artie on “The Larry Sanders Show,” I’m torn. The Bounty is packed with coconut and covered in milk chocolate. While I like Bounty’s milk chocolate, I prefer the dark chocolate of the Mounds. Bounty’s coconut is a bit more finely minced; the meatier, thicker coconut flakes of the Mounds are better.
Wrapper ranking: 3
19) Nestle Crunch
I retroactively call B.S. on this aggressively cheery Nestle Crunch commercial from the 1980s, which features people biting into the candy bar and eliciting a sound-barrier-breaking crunch. It certainly didn’t do that when I bit into it.
While the crispy rice adds texture to the chocolate, the overall effect doesn’t exactly inspire.
Wrapper ranking: 10
20) 100 Grand
I was looking forward to 100 Grand being a sleeper fave, but it came up short. It’s a pleasant-enough candy, but it’s just not that good. The crisped rice in the chocolate adds welcome texture, but this bar is essentially a big, chewy lump of caramel that lacks saltiness.
Wrapper ranking: 4
