Why Trader Joe's KitKat Copycat Is One Of The Worst Chocolate Bars It Sells

It should come as no surprise to fans of the Trader Joe's grocery chain that many of its brand items are created to reproduce the taste and look of products by other major food manufacturers. Many of these 'dupes' have developed a following of their own, such as Magnifisauce, a McDonald's Big Mac sauce copycat, or the Chili & Lime Flavored Rolled Corn Tortilla Chips, a Takis carbon copy which customers crowned as their favorite four years in a row. However, not all Trader Joe's dupes are created equal.

Case in point: Trader Joe's Chocolate Covered Wafer Cookie, which did not place highly in our list of best and worst Trader Joe's chocolate bars. The company is clearly drawing a connection between its product and KitKat. For example, both feature wafer cookies coated in milk chocolate and packaged in a bright red wrapper. 

However, the similarities ended there. Our reviewer in the article above noted, "The item plays out like a mix between a KitKat and those cheap cookies sold at drugstores made from lightweight wafers with sweetened paste in between the layers." No one is going to mistake that write-up as a ringing endorsement.

That's not all our reviewer had to say about Trader Joe's Chocolate Covered Wafer Cookie. To them, the real problem lay with how insubstantial the bar is. "The wafers on the inside are seemingly microns thick, with barely detectable chocolate in between them, and it's all coated in a robe of chocolate that lacks all flavor," they wrote. "The end product is a candy bar that's so airy as to be ephemeral." Ouch.

It appears the bar's rank on our list matched some customers' opinions. On a Reddit thread for Trader Joe's, a handful of posters voiced their disappointment over Trader Joe's KitKat aspiration. "I've had the same package on my coffee table for 2 days now with 1 bite taken out of it because I want to like it but I can't," wrote one food waste-averse Redditor. Another compared it to wax "with a dash of chocolate." A third used the opportunity to tout the superiority of European chocolate to the American variety (which, predictably, generated a torrent of responses).

The most intriguing thing about the Reddit thread was the number of people that had a positive opinion of the bar. One poster's claim of being obsessed with them was echoed by more than a few people on the thread. So, on which side of the Chocolate Covered Wafer Cookie argument do you fall? There's only one way to find out. Thankfully, it involves eating chocolate.