Our Least Favorite Kit Kat Flavor Tastes Nothing Like Its Namesake

At most supermarket checkout aisles and gas station convenience stores, there will be one flavor of Kit Kat for sale: the regular, milk chocolate flavor. Of course, there are plenty of other flavors you can find on occasion. Once in a blue moon I find a vanilla Kit Kat on a shelf, for example. There's a wide world of Kit Kat bars to break off a piece of, and recently we here at The Takeout did a thorough taste test of 20 Kit Kat flavors which we ranked worst to best, including several Japanese exclusives. The strangest flavor (and not in a good way) is one you can find in the United States, but it's still a tough one to find in the store.

Our last place pick was the Chocolate Frosted Donut Kit Kat, which did not in fact taste much like a donut. Instead, our reviewer found it tasted more like bread and caramel than the rich and buttery flavor you'd expect from a flavor labeled "donut." While the bottom half of each Kit Kat bar has a light-colored, creamy coating, the top appears to just be the usual milk chocolate, which makes for a hard sell. There's little point in going out of your way for a Chocolate Frosted Donut Kit Kat (if you can even find one) as it seems too similar and yet not as tasty as the standard-issue milk chocolate flavor. It would be ironic if those Kit Kat thieves from earlier this year wound up stealing mostly this flavor. 

Chocolate Frosted Donut is a relatively new flavor which launched in late 2023. There are plenty of unique Japanese Kit Kat flavors, but American Kit Kats tend to be limited to simple flavors; making it disappointing that a more unusual flavor in the United States didn't live up to its potential. That said, online reviews appear to be polarizing as people either hate them or love them.

You can find reviewers who think they smell and taste exactly like a chocolate donut when they open up the packaging. Still, others across social media sites like Reddit and Facebook (genuinely good sources for supermarket candy opinions) felt like they tasted too synthetic or overly sweet. That, or there wasn't much to make it taste different from a normal Kit Kat; which makes sense, considering the reused milk chocolate on top. Multiple people on Reddit claimed they ate one stick of a king-size pack and tossed the rest out. One especially biting Facebook review said it tasted like "sorrow and depression," and that it certainly didn't taste like donuts at all.

What was the winning flavor here at The Takeout, then? The best Kit Kat flavor tastes like Girl Scout cookies meets Andes mints because we picked mint and dark chocolate.