The Best Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookie Flavor Leaves A Refreshing Aftertaste
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Growing up, my mom would occasionally come home from the grocery store with a bag of Pepperidge Farm Dark Chocolate Milano cookies, much to my delight. Two elongated biscuit cookies sandwiched a thin layer of dark chocolate, creating cookie perfection. Today, this flavor is just one of more than 20 that Pepperidge Farm has offered over the years, although the word is that the cookies are one of the snacks that have been shrinking in size. The Takeout was curious to know how these flavors stood up to each other — and if any were superior to the original chocolate flavor — so one of our resident tasters got the coveted job of sampling 11 different Milano flavors. The clear winner was Mint Chocolate.
Interestingly enough, the Mint Chocolate Milano was the first flavored Milano released by Pepperidge Farm in 1968. Our taster found the mint flavor to be "refreshing and snappy" and a perfect foil to the cookie's rich dark chocolate. He compared the flavor to the beloved Thin Mints, the best Girl Scout Cookie, and even tried freezing a Mint Chocolate Milano to see if it gave the same satisfaction as chilled Thin Mints. (It didn't.) Still, to take the number one spot means you need to stand out in a big way, and Mint Chocolate did just that.
The first Milanos were a failure
It's hard to imagine a world without Milano cookies. After all, the biscuits, in all their flavors, have reached an iconic status in America. They've made appearances in Oscar swag bags and on television shows, and they've even broken into the world of high fashion. In early 2025, the glam designer Moschino partnered with Pepperidge Farm to create a designer handbag that looked just like a package of Lemon White Chocolate Milanos, the flavor that ranked sixth on our list. But the first iteration of the cookie was a complete disaster, and if the founders hadn't revamped the recipe, we may not have these cookies at all.
In 1956, Pepperidge Farm released a cookie it called "Naples," which featured a biscuit-style cookie topped with a layer of chocolate. But the chocolate on the open-faced cookie melted rapidly when exposed to heat, so, to fix the issue, the company added another biscuit on top, creating a sandwich cookie. It released the new confection under the name "Milano" in 1957 and never looked back. Pepperidge Farm must have reconsidered the original cookie at some point because it eventually released its "Geneva" cookie, which is an open-faced biscuit coated with chocolate and pecans. It's one of my personal favorites, and I haven't opened a melted package of these Swiss-inspired cookies yet.