Our Least Favorite Chocolate Treat At Whole Foods Is Tasteless

Whole Foods is primarily known for being the best store for organic shopping, but it's also stocked with chocolatey treats. You'll find a good selection of vegan chocolate bars, fair trade chocolates, and locally sourced chocolates, along with chocolate-based health supplements and chocolate-covered snacks such as nuts, fruits, pretzels, and candies. Some of them, however, are better than others. In a ranking of 15 popular chocolate products from Whole Foods, Tasting Table taste testers found that one product in particular was their least favorite: Lily's Dark Chocolate Covered Caramels.

Looking at the bag, Lily's Dark Chocolate Covered Caramels are enticing — but the devil's in the details, or, in this case, the labels. What first raised flags with our taste testers was the cocoa content. At just 55% percent, the chocolate that coats these caramels can hardly be considered "dark." Nor should you expect that deep, rich, flavor you'd associate a true dark chocolate with. The other red flag came up when our taste testers noticed that Lily's Dark Chocolate Caramels contained just 1 gram of sugar per serving. Instead, they're sweetened with stevia, a sugar-free alternative that they linked to the chocolate treat's lack of flavor.

Don't let the bag fool you. While stevia might make Lily's Dark Chocolate Caramels a safe option for those watching their blood sugar levels, it didn't get our blood pumping either. In the end, our taste testers were left disappointed. Fortunately, Whole Foods has other options.

As stated above, Whole Foods is known for being the best place to shop organic— so it's no surprise that the best chocolate treat our taste testers tried just so happened to be an organic one. The sea salt-flavored dark chocolate bar from Theo, which is both organic and fair-trade, was fittingly ranked number one. But, Whole Foods is also home to a great selection of vegan-friendly options — chocolates included. Taste testers determined that Hu's Salt Dark Chocolate was the best tasting vegan chocolate period, and you can find it along with a selection of other flavors of the brand's chocolate bars at Whole Foods.

Whole Foods also has a selection of vegan chocolate candies. Unreal has a line of vegan and non-vegan peanut butter cups, gems (their version of M&M's), and chocolate-covered pretzels. If you're looking for sugar-free chocolate treats at the store, however, Whole Foods has a selection of those, too. Choc Zero and Evolved are two brands Whole Foods carries that make keto-friendly chocolate treats sweetened with another sugar alternative known as monk fruit.

There are also other options you might be interested in if you want something with less sugar. The Little Secret Dark Crispy Wafers and the 365 Chocolate Brownies both had significantly less sugar than you'd find from similar chocolate treats — and they didn't fail to impress.