The Best Hershey's Chocolate Bar Flavor On Shelves Comes From The '90s

The Hershey Company has been in business since 1894, and it's become such an enduring American pop culture symbol that even has its own theme park. Of course, it's also well known for its signature milk chocolate, Hershey's Kisses, and other check-out lane treats. We recently revisited the brand by taste-testing (and ranking) 13 different Hershey's chocolate bar flavors to see which nostalgic Hershey's variety still catches our attention. One item came out on top — and it wasn't the classic milk chocolate bar.

To our surprise, our favorite of the bunch wasn't actually chocolate-based, but rather Hershey's Cookies 'n' Creme bar, which is a relative latecomer in the Hershey catalog, having been released in 1995. (It also made our list of the best and worst Halloween candy of 2026 with the Cookies 'n' Creme Vampire Fangs.) This white creme bar with chocolate cookie-like bits reverses the arrangement of an Oreo by making the creme the main attraction, while the cookie plays the supporting role. 

The creme is milky, accented texturally with the crisp cookie crunch. We will admit: The whole bar skews sweet, but that also keeps you from wolfing it down all at once. It's even pretty to look at, as our taste tester noted. "The bar itself is just a lovely sight too, with its top almost looking like a spotted cow, and its bottom like another pebble-lined path I'd love to walk a thousand miles on," they wrote.

This one's sort of a shocker, even to us, but the "creme" in the Hershey's Cookies 'n Creme bar isn't actually white chocolate, which would be everyone's natural assumption. In fact, if you look on the wrapper itself, you'll notice there's no mention of chocolate or cocoa butter at all. In 2008, Hershey's made a big change to some product formulas, and one key component of white chocolate, cocoa butter, was removed from some products due to price considerations. The cocoa butter was subsequently replaced with vegetable oil.

Obviously, that hasn't stopped us from enjoying it, though it is a confusing (and mildly disappointing) delineation. The only chocolate involved would be in the cookie portion, since there's no substituting the flavor there. We're not the only ones who are fixated on this bar; in a thread on Reddit, one person commented, "These are one of my favorite chocolate bars of all time." And it would also be ours in the entire Hershey bar lineup.