Ranking 19 Ritter Sport Chocolates

Few things in this life are less devastating than finding out you’ll be sampling a boatload of chocolate. This is doubly true in the case of Ritter Sport, which is a family favorite and — at least from our point of view — one of the winningest chocolate brands on the planet. Suffice it to say, “I love my job” has been playing on repeat in my head this week.

Ritter Sport was founded in Germany in 1912, in the Bad Cannstatt neighborhood of Stuttgart. Just goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same: Germany is the world’s biggest chocolate exporter today (even though Switzerland eats the most). Ritter came up with their signature idea in 1932: make the bars square. Why? So they can fit in the pocket of a sport coat, of course … and thus, Ritter Sport as we know it was born. Today, Ritter Sport has an extensive range of chocolate bars, from nuts and cookies to cornflakes and peppermint cream, to satisfy any palate.

As for our taste test, they sent 19 of the 21 varieties that are currently available in the US. I pulled the gang together (as I have in the past for coffee ice cream and chocolate cake, among others) to increase our sample size. Together, the Mother, Father, Husband, Small Girl, Small Boy, and I ate our way through all 19 bars to bring you a (somewhat) unbiased ranking.

Right out of the gate, we must note that, yes, some of these chocolate bars were better than others. However, literally none of them were terrible. I would happily eat every single one over nothing, and if it happened to be a certain time of month and I’d had a bad day, I’d happily eat five. So take this ranking with a grain of salt, understanding that what you may like and what my family liked will differ.

That said, white chocolate with whole hazelnuts was … fine. The white chocolate from Ritter Sport is less inspiring than their milk and dark chocolates and has less creamy flavor than other brands on the market. As for whole hazelnuts, they were delicious and high-quality, but nobody liked how big the chunks were.

Although I love a good chocolate-covered strawberry, I haven’t found strawberries and chocolate to meld particularly well in bar form, and Ritter Sport’s milk chocolate with strawberry creme was no exception. This isn’t their fault, IMHO — at least not any more than it is for any other brand. It’s not because the flavors don’t play well (or we wouldn’t have that aforementioned classic, the choco-covered strawberry), but I’ve never met a product I liked that used them.

It should be noted, however, that my entire family agrees with this philosophy, so it might have put the Ritter Sport version at an unfair advantage in this house. If you do love this flavor profile, then strawberry creme might be the bar for you.

Raisins and chocolate belong together in exactly one place: Raisinets. Are you a Raisinet? I’ll eat you. No? I will not. Or at least, that has historically been my stance. I was excited for an opportunity to question it in the form of the Ritter Sport milk chocolate with raisins and hazelnuts, but it turns out my stance was right all along: These flavors don’t belong together, and they never have.

Again, it wasn’t due to a quality issue. The chocolate was nice, the hazelnuts were roasted to perfection, and … I mean, a raisin is a raisin. Combined, though, they gave strong great-grandma vibes. When compared to all the other options lying around, this one just didn’t jump out.

Yes, putting cornflakes in chocolate does sound quite weird, but it’s not as weird as you’d think. For one thing, there was also puffed rice in this bar. If you like Nestle Crunch, then you’ll probably love this one. The milk chocolate from Ritter Sport is reliably smooth, creamy, and mild, so it might be a good one for kiddos.

Honestly, I’d rank this higher than is represented here. I think the main problem was the presence of so many Philistines at the table who didn’t appreciate the puffed rice, and who therefore dragged the ranking down. Although I’d like to blame it on the oldies in the group, the Small Girl ranked it quite low as well. For my money, feel free to give it a try.

Honeyed almonds are good. Sea salt is good. Milk chocolate is good. As is the common problem with all of the lower-ranked Ritter Sport chocolate bars, it wasn’t the quality that was the issue; some of the flavor combos just seemed a bit off. As already stated, this is obviously a matter of personal preference, and any time a company is putting dozens of versions of a product out into the world, some are probably going to be better than others.

In this case, it mostly boiled down to the issue of combining honey and almonds with milk chocolate, when the consensus is those flavors are better suited to dark. And, as the Husband pointed out, while honey is good, honey flavor is not so much.

Here’s where it started getting pretty good. I like dark chocolate, and I like hazelnuts, so for me, this was an a-okay product. However, there are some dark haters in the family, which brought the overall ranking down. Also, this product suffered from the same problem as the milk chocolate with hazelnuts, which is that whole nuts and chocolate bars don’t mix super well. The whole point of Ritter Sport is that it’s easy (fits in a coat pocket and all that), so having to chew whole nuts just feels kind of antithetical.

I do realize, of course, that “having to chew whole nuts” is hardly equivalent to working a 16-hour day in a gulag. My point is just that if you can distribute filling more evenly, it’s a plus. Even the Father, a consummate nut obsessive, agrees.

In a perfect world, I would have a ready supply of Mounds on hand at all times. (Of course, in that perfect world, I’d either be immune to calories or they wouldn’t contain any. Life, amiright.) Point being, I like coconut with chocolate, and Ritter Sport nailed the combination pretty well overall. The ranking was dragged down somewhat by the Small Girl’s disinterest, but don’t let that dissuade you from trying it.

If there’s one drawback in this flavor, it was that the coconut filling was so smooth, and there wasn’t enough of it. We like a good bite of shredded, sweetened coconut — e.g., what you’d find in a coconut macaroon or a Mounds bar — and this didn’t have it.

Dark chocolate and marzipan is another combination that tends to get good reviews in my house, as well as in my household of origin, so it was no surprise that Ritter Sport’s dark chocolate with marzipan filling went over pretty well. Its placement in the bottom half of the list is once again an indication of the Small Girl not liking it rather than the rest of us finding it ho-hum. (TBH, if it’s not standard milk chocolate, she’s only so interested.)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this flavor disappointed not in the quality of its ingredients (which were good), but in their combination. While chocolate and almonds are hardly strange bedfellows, we would have liked more marzipan. Still, I absolutely loved it.

If you’re a darker-the-better kind of chocolate fan, as the Small Boy is, then you’re going to love this variety. It was rich, smooth, and super creamy, though as you might expect, it was also bitter due to its low sugar and milk content, so it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I’ve recently learned of a trend of pairing chocolate with cheese, and I think this would be a good candidate for marriage to a nice blue cheese.

Beware that although many varieties of extra dark chocolate are vegan by default, Ritter Sport does use milk products even in its darkest varieties. They do, however, have several vegan varieties for those who love a vegan chocolate bar, though those — like other flavors — are available intermittently, so you’ll have to check in your location.

Pretty much all dark chocolate is good dark chocolate in my mind, so I wasn’t surprised to enjoy this one. I also wasn’t surprised that most of my family members did not, however. Only the Small Boy liked it along with me — and indeed, more than me. Although it was a whole 20% lower in chocolate content than the option above, it still tasted pretty dark, so you shouldn’t opt for this one unless you really mean it.

This would make a good chocolate bar for baking. Before you hear a ring of “face for radio” in that comment, though, it’s not a burn. I genuinely think that this would be an excellent choice for making chocolate bark or chopping roughly to put in cookies, and it won’t cost you much more (if any) than baker’s chocolate at the store.

Here we go with the whole hazelnuts again. You already know what I’m going to say: The hazelnuts themselves are good; the fact that they are whole is not. The milk chocolate was no different than the dark or white in that respect, which is to Ritter Sport’s credit in the sense that their products are consistent. However, agnostic of the type of chocolate, whole hazelnuts (even lil’ ones) are just too big to stick inside a chocolate bar.

The good thing about the whole hazelnuts, I will say, is that they make for a perfect bar to chop up and sprinkle into cookies or muffins, and they were also nice sprinkled onto white chocolate to make bark. So there’s a benefit to whole hazelnuts, just not in a bar.

All right, are you ready to solve the Great Hazelnut Conundrum with me? It’s actually pretty easy: just buy the milk chocolate with hazelnuts. These are crushed and distributed evenly throughout the chocolate, which makes for a lovely effect. This bar was decadent, rich, and creamy, with just the right amount of sweetness and a dairy-forward feel. Everyone in the family liked this one, and it got snapped up quickly at the end, when we took turns choosing leftovers (then licking them to make sure no one would try anything).

This is the bar I would recommend you give a nut lover in their stocking or surprise them with after work. It doesn’t have the prettiest package compared to some of the brighter ones, but it’s still nice.

While not my absolute favorite on the ranking, Ritter Sport’s milk chocolate with butter biscuit and cocoa creme was insanely good. Like, “religious experience” good. “Mark Watney eating anything other than potatoes when he comes home from Mars” good. Seriously, this bar tasted like the perfect combination of Bahlsen Leibniz Butter Biscuit Cookies (what I would have married if I hadn’t met my husband) and whipped chocolate spread, all wrapped in creamy milk chocolate.

If I were going to buy one bar on this list as an afternoon snack, it would be this one. It was the perfect combination of a sweet treat with a little bit of stick-to-your-bones food value in the form of cookies, and it would be excellent accompanied by coffee.

While the word “praline” can have many meanings, depending on what recipe you’re looking at or whom you ask, the general term is a decadent mix of sugar and nuts, and that’s absolutely what came through in the milk chocolate with praline filling. The delicious taste of hazelnuts permeated every bite, without it being overwhelming.

This is probably a good time to mention that chocolate sometimes fills me with guilt, due to all the exploitation that goes on in the industry. It was a nice breather to know that every bite of Ritter Sport we ate was Rainforest Alliance-certified, with a goal of 100 percent cocoa traceability by the end of 2025. Good praline and good values? Sign me up.

If you just read “milk chocolate with crunchy salted caramel” and thought to yourself, “Wow, I bet that’s good,” you are correct. It was good. Very good. As were all the other varieties of milk chocolate, the bar was smooth and creamy with a nice, mild flavor. The crunchy salted caramel was just that: crunchy, salty, caramel-y.

I can’t really find a downside here in the taste or the experience, although the Small Boy did find it had a weird mouthfeel (probably because the candied sugar in the crunchy bits was a bit gritty). And although I enjoy creativity in a title, I think a more direct description of this bar would be milk chocolate with toffee, but to each their own branding approach, I guess.

You wouldn’t think bog-standard milk chocolate would be this high on the list, would you? Like, what’s a regular old bar doing beating out options such as milk chocolate with butter biscuit and cocoa creme or dark chocolate with marzipan filling? Good questions, with a pretty easy answer: children.

The Small Girl and Small Boy were definitely huge fans of this mild, creamy, flavorful variety, which tasted like a cup of hot chocolate in bar form. To be honest, though, the grownups all loved it as well—including me, and you couldn’t pay me to eat milk chocolate if there was dark (or white) in the room. Alpine milk chocolate, though? It was an exception, and therefore I can only describe it as exceptional.

Here is when I’m forced to admit that we didn’t dislike all whole nuts, given milk chocolate with whole almonds ranked in this high. Granted, the whole almonds were quite small and were layered horizontally into the bar, so that they broke easily. They were also perfectly toasted, making them crunchier and reducing the amount of work required as compared to the hazelnuts.

As a general rule, we would still have preferred for the almonds to be crushed up, and had we been able to compare this to a version of that, we probably would have chosen the alternative. But something about milk chocolate and almond just can’t be beat, and Ritter Sport does the combo quite well in this bar.

This was, hands down, my favorite option on the list. I knew it would be, but that still didn’t stop me from nearly swooning when I had a bite of this one. I like pretty much any peppermint cream bar, but in my opinion, it’s quite a feat to surpass Andes creme de menthe thins. This bar did, and how.

If you’re not a chocolate peppermint fan like I am, then you may not care about how smooth the filling was or how rich and delicious the outer chocolate seemed when paired with it. You may also not care that it was the perfect mix of sweet and pungent, or that such buttery ingredients somehow tasted light rather than heavy. But I hope you do care, because OMG.

Let’s pause for a moment and enjoy that music. Do you hear it? The heavenly choir of angels singing about how freaking good this chocolate is? Seriously, it’s that good. If there is an Afterlife, and you are good enough to go there, then you will doubtless find milk chocolate with cocoa mousse filling when you arrive.

Ritter Sport has outdone itself with this bar. Comprised of a smooth and rich filling that tastes like the perfect mixture of milk and dark, surrounded by a creamy milk chocolate casing for each square, it was true heaven. The Father — a notoriously stingy rater in any taste test — gave it top marks and couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it. The rest of us were right behind him.

Ranking delicious chocolates is, while far from a chore, still somewhat challenging. For one thing, you’ve got to weigh a lot of different factors: white, milk, and dark chocolate; plain or with fillings; creamy or crunchy … and the list goes on. Creating an actual ranking reflects personal taste more than anything else, which is why I pulled together five family members for this taste test, the better to increase our sample size.

We discussed the merits of each bar, then measured it against what we thought an ideal version would be. For example, take white chocolate with whole hazelnuts. Rather than ranking that against dark chocolate with peppermint filling, which is a horse of a different color entirely, we tried to determine how well that bar fulfilled its job of being white chocolate with hazelnuts. In that particular case, not super well. As for how well the dark chocolate with peppermint did its job, we found it to be the quintessential representation of these flavors on Earth.

Everyone else did the same with each bar, after which we discussed how well each variety excelled. Together, taking into account the likes and dislikes of each individual to balance out personal preference, we created the overall ranking. That way you, Dear Reader, can look for the best example of whatever category you prefer and buy accordingly!