21 Cadbury Chocolate Bars Ranked

In Great Britain, and in many other parts of the world, Hershey's chocolate doesn't carry weight, as Cadbury is the name in chocolate. The company produced its first milk chocolate bar in 1897, and in the ensuing century plus, has delivered time and time again delicious handheld candies with fun names to say.

What's nice in this day and age is that global products are more readily available to buy locally. Outside of Haribo gummy candies, Cadbury is one of the main imported brands with many bars at our eating disposal. The Takeout gathered 21 popular Cadbury chocolate bars (sorry Creme Eggs, you don't qualify) together and pitted them against one another, to find out once and for all which are the cream of the crop, and which ones we should perhaps bury. Just don't tell my dentist that I did this right after my last exam. Shhh.

The Fudge bar that's been kicking around since 1948, measures at a hair under 4 inches. From the outside, it looks like a downsized-Twix, and within its thin chocolate coating lies the title confection.

While it's certainly more filling than it looks, sadly, fudge inside Fudge is nothing to write home about. Americans take their fudge rather, well, fudgy, and this is more of a dry drudge. Perhaps if it was more akin to the type of fudge one gets at a boardwalk down by the shore, this would be more of a sure thing.

The Crunchie bar originally launched in 1929 under the Fry's brand, but it remains popular enough to warrant multiple flavors and even a small nugget form. The lengthy 5 ¼ inch bar has a top chocolate layer that has a wavy adornment reminiscent of a 3 Musketeers bar.

What it's hiding inside was unlike any bar I had encountered before. Normally that's a welcome thing, but the honeycomb interior turned out to be off-putting in appearance, texture, and taste. It looks like a peach pit, and has an unappealing, coarse brick crunch that somehow never moistens within the mouth. Imagine a freeze-dried ice cream that never reveals its melty magic.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the TimeOut Wafer, a 4 ½ inch bar, where an atypical wafer is thinly coated in milk chocolate. There's also nothing exciting about it either. Basically, if you're into wafers that have the consistency of styrofoam, and prefer the chocolate of Cadbury, this is probably your best bet.

To me, it feels like something is missing here. Some peanut butter could have helped, as it does with Little Debbie's Nutty Butty bars, or perhaps Cadbury could go retro on this bar and return it to its original 1992 form, when the TimeOut was essentially a Flake covered in chocolate.

Mixing fruit with chocolate is a combination with more misses than hits. While chocolate covered strawberries are a divine treat, the flavoring orange doesn't seem to be one that has penetrated our continental treats, beyond Lindt Lindor truffles and Milano cookies. Not well known is an orange flavored Twirl, which began with a limited run in 2019, before becoming a permanent fixture in 2021.

I was very surprised at how restrained the orange flavoring was that dotted this Twirl. I didn't exactly love this bar, but its Twirl-ness kept it a head above the bars above. One thing I don't get is why not a single part of this bar is colored orange?

With a name like Starbar, it has to be an out of this world delight, right? Turns out this one has had a bit of an identity crisis over the years, launched in 1976, then renamed Peanut Boost 13 years later, before returning to its original name in 1994.

At 4 inches long, this one has a lot going under its chocolate hood, where ground peanuts and caramel compete for space. Normally, I would be all aboard a spaceship headed for a bar that sounds like Starbar, but those minced peanuts are more of a giant leap back than forward for mankind's candy appetites. No wonder Cadbury renamed it from Peanut Boost. More like Peanut Boos. What an astronomical disappointment.

Wispa is another bar with an interesting timeline. It was launched in a test market back in 1981, and with huge demand, it eventually went national three years later. It disappeared and was replaced by a similar bar in 2003, but thanks to a vocal online fanbase, it relaunched in 2008 and stayed around for good ever since.

Wispa is fun to say for sure, but any fun to eat? Have you ever had the pleasure of eating the classic Aero bar, now manufactured by Nestlé? It's a literal taste sensation, as the chocolate interior has an airy, bubbly look and feel to it. The Wispa is aiming for similar territory, but it is sadly a mildly-pale imitator.

Dairy Milk Whole Nut is quite the classic bar, giving customers the option to go nutty since 1933. It has the same beautiful curvy shape as a standard Dairy Milk bar on the top, and if you turn it over, you'll see a generous amount of the promised nuts creating chocolaty bumps on the bottom.

Since it seems impossible to make a bad variant of Dairy Milk, this is indeed a solid bar to eat. However, the whole hazelnuts, while a fine option for inclusion, seems like the wrong nut to make this one whole. What if they included more nuts, like pecans and walnuts and renamed it Dairy Milk A Whole Lot of Nuts?

In 1976, Cadbury nicked the name of the double decker bus for a new bar. The modern version of it, where the top deck is outfitted with nougat, and the bottom with a crunchy cereal filling, started motoring in 1991.

This treat receives high marks on its name, weight, and structured design. However, in taste, this tiered division feels more like subtraction than a bar that totally adds up to a singular great one. Imagine tasting a 3 Musketeers if it were laying on a bed of a (formerly Nestlé) Crunch. That sounds like something we would happily pay our fare for, but sadly the nougat is too dominant, hogging all of the seats. They should make one where the nougat and the cereal are combined, and call it Big Ben.

Having a punny name like Wunderbar is a great introduction to a candy that promises the contents within its Wonka-like wrapper are simply "wonderful," as the German saying goes. This 5-incher has been looming large in Canada since the mid-1970s, and pairs peanut butter with caramel under a coating of chocolate.

Peanut butter apparently isn't a widespread ingredient in Cadbury's products, and out of all the bars taste-tested, this was the only one to feature it. While it was a nice and chewy bar, overall, I feel like it's not as wonderful as the bar's name would indicate. However, my opinion on it improved when I tried it chilled. The hardened peanut butter matched up better with the caramel, and in a way was like a less potent Butterfinger.

When I saw the blue coloring on the Boost wrapper, ideas of a Cadbury version of Almond Joy or Bounty Bar came front and center. Thankfully, no coconut was harmed in the making of this product, although apparently when it first came to market in 1985, it was indeed coconut flavored.

Today, the elements boosting the Boost are a biscuit with a cocoa center, wrapped in caramel, and further wrapped in chocolate. This one cuts beautifully with a knife to form slices reminiscent of chocolate salami. The chocolaty biscuit is the centerpiece of this Twix-like treat, and would probably be better served with a crisper cookie biscuit, and a second helping of caramel. I guess that's what a Twix is for, but Cadbury's loose take is certainly no loser.

Wispa Gold is a good old Wispa with the addition of caramel. This metallic bar joined the track meet in 1995, and left the stadium at the same time Wispa did, back in 2003. It hit the comeback trail six years later, and when Great Britain hosted the Olympics in 2012, Wispa Gold returned to stores' podiums for good.

This 5-inch bar looks like a regular Wispa from the outside, but thankfully its added gooey innards sets this one far apart from its forerunner. The Wispa's focus is on the bubbly chocolate, but here, the Gold's free-flowing caramel makes it more medal worthy. One way to actually make this one a true gold winner is to throw it in the fridge and solidify that caramel a bit. It almost becomes like an enlarged Chomp. Almost.

Dairy Milk Caramel has that same lovely bumpy smooth look of the standard issue Dairy Milk, but skimps on the chocolate to make room for the splashy brown substance held within. The pieces break easily, but can quickly turn into a mess with the oozing caramel being pulled apart.

The delicious caramel here is cut from the same cloth as the one that lines a Wispa Gold. Since Dairy Milk is superior to Wispa, it's easy to pick a winner between the two to hold that caramel. Since the caramel is a little too silky smooth, perhaps skip sharing this one with friends and loved ones.

If you love nuts in your chocolate, you have great taste. And the more nuts, the better, right? While the Dairy Milk Whole Nut kept up its end of the bargain, I wasn't so nuts about the included hazelnuts. In Cadbury's Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut, crunchy almonds make up one half of the namesake duo. Yet, with half the amount of real estate, those almonds end up being twice as nice, and delicious.

Raisins and chocolate have kind of fallen out of fashion in the U.S., but the combo is still going strong in the U.K. Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut includes raisins (which are called what they actually are — dried grapes), but here they contribute more of a texture than a leading flavor. Still, it's a nice complement to a candy bar born in 1928 and showing no signs of slowing down.

If we did a ranking of Cadbury bars with the best names, Curly Wurly would be the undisputed champ. The fun continues beyond the name. Get past the wrapper and marvel at the creative contours of this treat, which looks like a braided rope bridge, or perhaps a line of pretzels holding arms and doing a cancan dance.

This treat is light to the touch, and also to snack on. It's essentially a Chomp bar, but made thinner and stretched out into that amusing, yet fragile signature pattern. When one starts to break up the Curly Wurly into bits, the pieces look like Zs and Ns. Multiple Zs usually denote a snooze fest, but do not sleep on Curly Wurly, which is not only fun, but a great little bar.

Folding chocolate running over a mold at the Cadbury factory led one creative employee to come up with a new chocolate product in 1920 called Flake. While this thin but elongated 6-inch stick of chocolate looks like a dry petrified rope, an eater quickly learns this is one rope that's hard to wrap your fingers around.

Out of all the Cadbury bars, this one is a certified mess to deal with. Open the package and flakes of the Flake are already all over the place. Pick it up in your hands, and Flake starts getting all flaky again.

If you can survive this tactical experience you will be rewarded with one great hunk of chocolate. It starts off dry, but when Flake enters your mouth, it's almost like a tsunami of chocolate is being unleashed. I need to make my own Flake 99, where that bar lives in the center of an ice cream cone.

One of the most creative Dairy Milk bars, and Cadbury bars in general, has got to be the Marvelous Creations line. This idea became a reality in 2013, and has included such wild combos as Cola Pretzel Honeycomb. The one flavor that has stuck around the longest features fruit-flavored jellies, crispy sugar coated cocoa candies, and crackling popping candy.

You can tell right off the bat this isn't your great-grandfather's average Dairy Milk bar, as it ditches the standard rounded chunks and instead looks like a groovy belt made up of Chewbacca's hair. Personally, I'm not a giant jelly ring fan, but after encountering it, in conjunction with the tiny M&M-esque pieces and hidden Pop Rocks-ish crystals, I couldn't deny the awesome eating experience this bar takes me on. It's like getting lost in Wonka's chocolate factory, where every twist and turn is simply marvelous!

All of the Dairy Milk bars we nibbled on proved to be quality candies due in large part to the Dairy Milk chocolate shell that's been a staple of British culture dating back to 1904. It came to be a challenge to make the milkiest of milk chocolates at the time.

While fully loaded candy bars are definitely a winning recipe, sometimes greatness lies in straight simplicity. There's nothing like entering pure chocolate bliss with a good old Hershey bar, and the same holds true when indulging in its basic U.K. equivalent. Six rounded chunks are at an eater's disposal, and once the teeth sink itself into one of them, its firmness gives way to a melty milk chocolate tidal wave that the mouth is ever so happy to drown in.

We can thank the Irish branch of Cadbury for giving the world Twirl. Originally launched in 1987 as a single finger bar, where the talents of a Flake get encased in milk chocolate. Today, consumers are treated to a pair of these 4 ½-inch bars in a single package.

We've already sung the praises of the Flake bar, and the Twirl is essentially an improvement on that grand original. The chocolate coating here serves a dual purpose. Firstly, it keeps the flaky chocolate in place to make it less of a mess, and secondly, its smooth shell is a neat juxtapositioning texture running up against the more dry interior. If you've never had the pleasure of trying this, be sure to give it a Twirl.

Mr. Goodbar may be one of the biggest names in chocolate for over 100 years, but Mr. Big, who hails from Canada, has been working his own excised wonders on candy lovers since 1977. This large feller, which has counted both Wayne Gretzky and Shaquille O'Neal as spokesmen, was originally brought to market by Neilson, and now lives on under the Cadbury name.

This mammoth bar looks like an overly-chocolate dipped, lumpy pretzel rod. Once you get past its intimidating appearance and get on with actually eating it, a cavalcade of deliciousness awaits you. Never before has a vanilla wafer worked so well as a candy bar. In its acceptance speech as a top three Cadbury bar in this tasting, it naturally has to thank its stellar supporting cast of caramel, peanuts, rice crisps, and milk chocolate shell, which makes for quite the troupe.

Mr. Big and Picnic are really similar bars, playing on the strengths of caramel, peanuts, and crispy cereal. Mr. Big takes up a lot of real estate, but it ultimately couldn't overshadow the stout 5 ½ inches of Picnic.

The absence of the wafer in the Picnic bar turned out to be a plus. Without it taking up all that space, it freed up the other supporting ingredients, including the bonus of chewy dried grapes (aka raisins), to become lead flavors. Picnic bar first came to light under the Fry's name in 1958, and is certainly easier to lug around than a blanket and basket filled with cheese and crackers.

To be completely honest, I have been a Chomp bar fan since the late 20th century, and it has retained a special place in my heart ever since. It's probably because of this small bar, which is just a tab of chewy caramel encased in a thin layer of milk chocolate, that I came to appreciate the Cadbury catalog and set forth on this ranking.

I gave every single bar I tried a fair and honest shake, hoping one would prove to be the greatest thing I've ever tasted. Picnic and Mr. Big came really close to being crowned the best of the best, but I couldn't deny the simple awesomeness of a Chomp bar, which has been a pocket delight ever since 1989. This bar exemplifies Cadbury's two strongest aces in its repertoire — its caramel and chocolate, and delivers it in a perfectly compact way. Mr. Little Chomp remains a giant winner in my book. It's not just the best Cadbury bar, but my favorite candy bar the world over (with apologies to a Whatchamacallit).

Cadbury produces dozens and dozens of bars around the world. For the purposes of this taste-test ranking, I identified the Cadbury bars that both had a more permanent status on shelves, and most importantly, availability in the United States. The 21 bars were purchased between two candy shops in New York City — the incredible Economy Candy, and quaint shop Tea & Sympathy.

The bars were initially sampled at room temperature, in alphabetical order, over two sessions. The bars were then refrigerated and further sampled for comparison. Four people took part in this chocolaty task, and while the opinions of the others were noted, ultimately, this ranking was based on my own opinion, tastes, and experiences past and present with the bars. The ultimate criteria for this ranking included flavor, appearance, texture, aroma, familiarity, uniqueness, overall lovability, and likelihood I would want to buy them again.