Rankings Week: Best candy bars
(It’s Rankings Week on The Kelley Black Book. I need content. Lists are easy. All week, I’ll offer up some thoughts on weird lists sure to make people mad at me.)
As a current, former, and probably future fat guy, candy bars are extremely important to me. I’ve devoted far too much mental energy to looking at the offerings at the grocery checkout to decide how to best allocate my fat-kid time.
So today, I will ease you of that future mental energy by ranking the candy bars. This doesn’t mean you always get #1, but your thought process should start there. Because my rankings are definite.
(Also, I’m ranking the 25 bars I thought of/have experience with. Sorry, Zero Bar enthusiasts and Hazelnut M&M diehards, I didn’t bother. These are just the ones I deemed worthy of ranking.)
1. Reese’s Fast Break
Variants on the classics are often a dicey proposition, because the classics are classics for a reason. But while Reese’s Cups are amazing (and I’ll talk about them more later), the Fast Break adding nougat to the mix and making it a bona fide bar instead of cups is like George Lucas coming back for Empire and adding Lando. (I’m not a Star Wars guy, but I think that works.) Just a masterstroke.
Best form: King Size
2. PayDay
I bet this one’s an upset. But man, if you’re not in the mood for chocolate in a given moment, ain’t nothing better. PayDay is the saltiest little thing in the world, and I love it. The crucialness of PayDay, though, is that you have to get it in the right size. Standard PayDays are too thin and throw off the balance of caramel and peanut. So a standard PayDay would drop down this list a bit. But right size and it’s a wonder
Best form: King size
3. Baby Ruth
Also an upset, I imagine, but I’ve never understood why Baby Ruth isn’t considered one of the big dogs in the candy bar world. Peanuts, caramel, chocolate, nougat. It’s a Snickers-plus. The one knock on Baby Ruth? Too messy. The exterior chocolate loves to fall apart mid-bite.
Best form: Fun size
4 Reese’s Pieces
Reese’s Pieces are what M&M’s aspire to be. Why the level of fame is inverse there is a mystery.
Best form: They only have one form and it’s delightful
5. Reese’s Sticks
Basically take a Nutty Bar and Reese’s-ify it, and it’s glorious. My one complaint with the Sticks is that there’s not enough resistance to them. The best wafer-y snacks fight back a little against the bite, but sticks crack right away. Small issue, but an issue.
Best form: Standard size
6. Butterfinger
I feel like Butterfinger has gone through wild swings in its popular acceptability over the year, not entirely unrelated to its connection to The Simpsons. It admittedly is very tooth-clogging, and that’s a drawback, but the flavor is absolutely on point. (I miss Butterfinger BBs.) King size is too damn thick — it would be much lower here — but the right size is wonderful. (Fat kid aside in a fat kid world: My standard Blizzard order is with Reese’s and Butterfinger, and you just can’t beat it.)
Best form: Standard size
7. Reese’s Cups
Reese’s has so many varying sizes and shapes just within the “chocolate and peanut butter” category that just saying “Cups” is incomplete. Consider this the catchall for any Reese’s product that is those flavors in X shape. But it is amazing how much shape and distribution matters, because mini cups are worse than regular cups, and super cups are worse than regular cups, and all those are worse than the majority of holiday-themed shapes, and it’s silly that there is so much clear delineation there.
Best form: Holiday shapes, probably Christmas
8. Snickers
Snickers are so boring. It’s like the baseline candy bar against which all others are measured. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Snickers, and I will happily eat them by the handful. But nobody has ever been excited by a Snickers. It’s like when you’re at a cookout and the only drink is RC or Big K or something. Fine, good! Never gonna pick it, never gonna be sad I had it!
(When I worked at O’Charley’s, the cooks would cook off a boatload of bacon early in the morning to use for however long it would hold out that day. When I would open, it would be Daniel’s Happy Bacon Time, and I’d swipe a couple pieces. One day, there were some spare fun size Snickers sitting around, I don’t remember why, and while I promise I wasn’t stoned, I thought it would be fun to wrap a piece of limp bacon around a fun size Snickers, and that is one of the happiest memories of all-time. And yes, a bacon-wrapped fun size Snickers at 10 a.m. explains a lot about my weight problems.)
Best form: Standard size
9. Peanut butter M&M’s
M&M’s are good! Peanut butter M&M’s are even better! I just don’t know why you’d get those when Reese’s Pieces already exist.
Best form: Any of them
10. Peanut M&M’s
I have moved Peanut M&M’s around this list like 10 times. I’m okay if you disagree with their final landing spot, but the main truth is that they are an improvement on the standard candy but not the BEST improvement.
Also, my brother once put out a mystery bag of M&M’s. He had gone to Hershey and, I don’t know, had a pile of mixed M&M flavors for us to try, and the mystery of going from a jalapeno M&M to a peanut M&M to a candy corn M&M was so very fun.
Best form: They are what they are
11. Twix
Twix are just fine. But I really want your candy bar’s gimmick to be “Look! There are two of them!” It’s like how Miller Lite advertises that it has more taste. More taste ain’t a thing, guys. It’s a qualitative thing, not quantitative.
Best form: Standard. Definitely — definitely — not fun size
12. Kit Kat
There is nothing wrong with Kit Kat. It’s definitely “there.” It suffers from the same problem as Twix, though, that its primary selling point is something other than its taste — in Kit Kat’s case, the fun break-aparty-ness of it all. Fun size/shape can be one thing about you, but it shouldn’t be the first thing.
Best form: Standard size
13. Krackel
I’m not altogether sure why Crunch Bar is the more ubiquitous crisped rice-and-chocolate bar, because Krackel is better.
Best form: Fun size
14. Standard M&M’s
I watched one season of The Biggest Loser, and I remember two things in particular about it. One, the contestants had to cook something showing what they had learned about healthy eating, and one guy cooked a dessert with like a stick and a half of butter, and the judges were like “The hell were you thinking using that much butter?”, and he said “unsalted butter” with a smirk like that fixed everything, and the judges were like “You’re an idiot.”
Second, there was some dude on there talking about candy, and one of the contestants (same guy as the unsalted butter, in fact) talked about how he liked M&M’s, and the smart science dude was like “Look, eat candy if you want to eat candy, but don’t freaking eat M&M’s, they are the least healthy things in the world.” And I have no idea how true that was or is, but it’s the first and only thing I ever think about when I have M&M’s now, and part of me feels bad, but another part of me feels like I’m sticking it to The Man.
Best form: Normal
15. Mr. Goodbar
Full disclosure: I couldn’t remember what Mr. Goodbar even was when I started this, I just remembered being super excited when I would get one from one of those mini bags when I was a kid. Good enough for me.
Best form: Fun size to evoke Halloween memories
16. Crunch
What I said above about Krackel applies — it’s superior to Crunch, because Crunch is too thin and Krackel applies better thickness — but crisped rice is still a home run of a candy bar ingredient.
Best form: Fun size
17. Peppermint Pattie
Peppermint Patties are very good … at the right time. When you’re in the mood for a Peppermint Pattie, there isn’t much that will beat it. But man, if you aren’t in the right frame of mind for that flavor, it doesn’t work at all. It’s just too moody to rank higher.
Best form: Normal size
18. 100 Grand
Crisped rice and caramel! 100 Grand is very good, but like Twix and Kit Kat, it suffers from the “too dependent on not-its-flavor” conceit. The old ads about “What would you do with 100 Grand?” were great, but there’s no memory about those commercials about the taste.
Best form: Fun size
19. Hershey’s
It’s chocolate. You can have little rectangles. No complaints, but blah.
Best form: Fun size
20. Milky Way
I don’t know why Milky Ways aren’t better than they are, but they aren’t. They’re just there.
Best form: Fun size
21. 3 Musketeers
Nougat’s too fluffy. Doesn’t work.
Best form: Normal size
22. Heath
I just don’t like toffee. Wish I did. Feels wrong not to.
Best form: No
23. Mounds
24. Almond Joy
Coconut is bad. Coconut with almonds is worse. These need to go.
Best form: Also no
25. Oreo Candy Bar
On base taste, Oreo bars are better than the coconut brothers. But the absurd disappointment of the Oreo bars pushes it down to the bottom. Oreos are the best cookies! Candy bars are wonderful flavors! There is no reason in the world these shouldn’t be delightful and surge right to the top of the rankings, but instead the mix of chocolate cookie and milk chocolate coating are just disastrous. I’m just so very angry that these are so bad. Oreo owes everybody an apology.
Best form: Regular Oreos, go away you awful candy bar