How Walmart's Great Value Chocolate Bars Compare To The Name Brands

Walmart's entire, stated reason for being is to save its customers money whenever possible. In that vein, it operates like so many other grocery and retail chains do by offering store brand, or private label, versions of name brand products. Often no-frills, low-key takes on well-known foods, treats, and snacks, the Great Value line is the name listed on Walmart's unfailingly cheaper versions of national, famous products. In the 2020s, Walmart's Great Value line quietly welcomed in some new items: budget-priced candy bars that are obviously intended to compete with (or offer a cheaper counterpart to) well-entrenched treats made by manufacturers like Hershey and Mars.

One notable difference is that Great Value candy bars — sold in both individual sizes and larger multi-serving packages at checkout stands — are quite cheap. Chocolate bars (even those not purchased at Walmart) used to cost under a dollar. The Great Value ones continue that trend for the most part. The other differences are numerous. Unfortunately, while some Great Value items taste just as good, if not better, than the brand-names, not everything that sets these candy bars apart is positive. Here's a head-to-head, side-by-side comparison, pitting the chocolate bars everyone knows up against their Walmart-exclusive imitators.

Before specialty chocolatiers arrived on the scene and places like Trader Joe's started selling a wide array of chocolate bars, the Hershey Bar was the gold standard of American chocolate, the household name associated with candy bars. Paling in comparison to imported and small-batch chocolate, along with reformulations, has made a Hershey Bar a mediocre choice as of 2025, but it's still enough of a big seller that Walmart included a replica in its line of Great Value versions of popular chocolate bars.

There are some shady things about Walmart's grocery department, and comparing a Hershey Bar to an imitation Hershey Bar brings the former's qualities to the forefront. The real deal offers prominent and pleasing notes of vanilla as well as a hint of imitation chocolate. It melts almost instantly in the hand and in the mouth, which indicates it's made of mostly real ingredients. The Great Value Milk Chocolate Bar is only sold in an extra-large shareable size for a lower per-ounce price than that of a smaller, regular-sized Hershey Bar. It is smooth and not as sweet as its name-brand counterpart. There are some slight fruity and nutty notes in both, but the Great Value version still tastes about 75% fake, ultimately more akin to cheap advent calendar chocolate.

For a long time, the most commercially present dark chocolate (which is considered to be healthier types) was Hershey's Special Dark. It tastes like a Hershey Bar but is more decadent. Sweet, tangy, and merely a little bitter, it provides an entry point into the vast world of dark chocolate bars with high cacao content and decreasing amounts of sugar. Hershey's Special Dark seems to have maintained the recipe that's been used for decades, and it's a nostalgic bite. It's a firm bar with a solid crunch in addition to its middle-of-the-road flavor of milk chocolate mixed with dark chocolate.

Walmart's Great Value Dark Chocolate Bar, obviously meant to lead customers into thinking it's the generic version of the Hershey's Special Dark, utilizes the same packaging colors. It is the best of all the mega-chain's takes on better-known chocolate bars as far as replication is concerned. The Great Value bar tastes very similar to Hershey's Special Dark in that it's not overly sweet, letting the nuanced and layered chocolate take the lead over cheap sugars. That aspect is commendable. However, the texture leaves something to be desired. The Great Value take is noticeably harder than the Hershey's, as if it was cooked too long. It's also gritty and kind of rough, and it leaves behind an aftertaste not experienced with the Hershey's.

One would think that both the Hershey's Special Dark with Almonds and its Walmart-only counterpart, the Great Value Dark Chocolate with Chopped Almonds Bar, would taste almost entirely the same as their nut-free counterparts. But neither one does. The formulation of the Great Value dark chocolate changed from 50% cocoa solids in the regular versions to 47% in the almond variety. While that may sound imperceptibly small, the respective chocolate bars feel completely different. The addition of almonds altered everything to where the already bitter dark chocolate becomes very bitter.

For the Hershey's Special Dark with Almonds, the nuance of the chocolate gets lost in the metaphorical noise of the almonds. The sweetness counteracting effect of the nuts pulls what little sweetness is in the candy, making for a bite that's at first bland and bitter but which transforms into a rich, chocolatey experience. In the Great Value Dark Chocolate with Chopped Almonds Bar, the taste is at first identical to that of the Hershey's Special Dark in that it's bland and bitter but it doesn't go anywhere after that, remaining in the sour lane throughout.

The biggest names in the mass-market toffee-and-chocolate sector are Skor and Heath. Those bars are nearly identical to one another. They consist of solid slabs of buttery, extraordinarily sweet, and very hard toffee that have been completely enrobed in a toned-down chocolate that lets the main ingredient thrive. The Great Value Milk Chocolate with Salted Toffee Bar is attractive with its large size and promise of not just toffee but salted toffee. However, it just can't compete with the big brands.

It only takes three ingredients to make toffee bits, and there aren't many of them in the Great Value Milk Chocolate with Salted Toffee product. The toffee chunks are tiny and spread so thin amidst the chocolate that they work more as a flavoring suggestion than a vital part of the bar. They melt on the tongue at least, but that's a function of them being so small. Toffee should be thick and substantial as well as sweet and creamy, as it is in a Skor or a Heath bar. At least the Great Value chocolate is creamy and velvety. It's too bad that it lacks a distinctive chocolate flavor.

The Big Kat chocolate bar was introduced around the early 2000s and has been hard to find in recent years. It was a KitKat variant that emphasized the chocolate instead of what technically made the original product special: thin and crispy wafers layered with a creamy chocolate filling. Curiously, when Walmart came up with the plan for its KitKat imitation, the Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafers Bar, it seemed to crib more from the obscure Big Kat than it did the omnipresent KitKat genuine article.

In a real KitKat, the outer chocolate — a unique, moderately sweet milk chocolate blend — just barely covers the interior of wafers and filling, which go out almost all the way to the sides and the top and bottom of the bar. The Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafers Bar is probably 75% chocolate. The wafers are thinner and smaller and just barely take up any space at all inside. They don't make much of an impression with respect to taste or texture. That results in a generic KitKat that tastes almost exactly like a Big Kat, which always had a ratio that greatly favored the chocolate to the wafer. The chocolate even tastes like the name-brand's formula, so this is one Great Value option that's worth the risk.

A Twix is a classic example of the sum being more than the sum of its parts. It's really got just three components: decent milk chocolate, crispy shortbread-style cookies, and a generous helping of thick caramel. The magic lies in the quantity of each ingredient and how they're used together. This fact becomes evident when a Twix is compared to Walmart's budget-priced and bare bones version, the Great Value Cookie and Caramel Bar. Snapping off part of a Twix to get a cross-section view, one can see that the cookie bar and caramel take up almost equal real estate under the chocolate. However, the cookie has also been drilled with equal-spaced holes, allowing for the caramel to seep inside and harden nicely.

The Great Value Cookie and Caramel Bar does not share the Twix's secret twist to quality. Breaking off a bar in the middle (which is harder to do cleanly, because the candy is softer than the name brand version) reveals that under that chocolate, it's almost all cookie. And that cookie is stale, free of flavor, and more crispy than it is crunchy. Also, there are no holes for the caramel to flow into, and there's very little caramel in there to begin with. It only appears as a thin, grainy, and overly sweetened layer.

Candy bars can actually be filling. "Packed with peanuts," Snickers ads and marketing materials once promised, "Snickers really satisfies." That would be the main difference between a Snickers and Walmart's Great Value Peanut, Caramel, and Nougat Bar. There isn't much to be found in the way of peanuts in the latter bar, either. First of all, it's much smaller than a standard-size Snickers, so there just isn't much space for the peanuts to shine. What nuts are in there are paltry, pale, disconcertingly soft, and finely chopped. In a Snickers bar, the peanuts are basically halved or roughly cut, roasted, and crunchy.

The other major selling points of a Snickers, the caramel and nougat, aren't represented reasonably in the Great Value imitation. The caramel is present in a very thin and hardly noticeable way while the nougat is gummy and lacking in flavor. All of this comes beneath some under-sweetened and low quality chocolate. In the end, one feels like they haven't eaten a Snickers or something close to it, but rather a chocolate bar imbued with some kind of Snickers-flavored agent. The Great Value Peanut, Caramel, and Nougat Bar is reminiscent of a Snickers-flavored latte or grocery store cake.

The Great Value Fluffy Nougat Bar is obviously supposed to emulate a 3 Musketeers bar, as it's a thick piece of candy made up of a sponge-like middle surrounded by a mildly sweetened milk chocolate. But more so than with any other of the Great Value candy bar knockoffs, the Fluffy Nougat Bar only resembles the original product when you first look at it. The nougat that makes up most of an original 3 Musketeers bar is sweet, velvety, and actually quite dense — not really all that fluffy.

The Great Value Fluffy Nougat Bar is shorter and thinner than a 3 Musketeers and the nougat offers a completely different color, consistency, and taste. Instead of an off-white, it's brown, and it's so lightweight as to leave almost no impression at all in a physical sense. The nougat also doesn't taste or smell like the chocolate-laced insides of a 3 Musketeers bar, only like chemicals in both regards.

The packaging of a Great Value Caramel and Nougat Bar makes a lot of promises upon which it does not and cannot deliver. At first glance, it appears as if the Walmart take on a Milky Way will successfully replicate the Mars-made product: a simple and straightforward concoction of sweet chocolate, chewy and melty, nougat, and a hearty ribbon of caramel. The Great Value Caramel and Nougat Bar gets bad marks simply for skimping on the caramel. This bar makes it clear that the only difference between a 3 Musketeers bar and a Milky Way is that the latter is made from nearly equal parts caramel and nougat. Walmart's take on a Milky Way tastes very much like the chain's store-brand version of a 3 Musketeers because it's just so nougat-heavy. Instead of an abundance of caramel, there's just an interior drizzle. It sits just underneath the outer layer of chocolate, which tastes bland, processed, and one-dimensional.

Texture-wise, the Great Value chocolate bar also strays far from the intent. A Milky Way is chewy and dense all at once, benefitting from the mix of mouthfeels of the three ingredients. The Great Value Bar is just all too chewy, more like an airy bubble gum than a chocolate bar.

In rating the chocolate bars for inclusion in this article, The Takeout purchased from Walmart every entry in Great Value's mini-line of snack-style chocolate bars. Some were sold in an individual serving size, while others were presented only in the larger, multiple portion style. Then the closest name-brand corollaries and inspirations for those bars were purchased, indicated by the packaging, description, and makeup of the Great Value entries.

Each Great Value chocolate bar was compared to its name-brand version and assessed in several criteria. They were judged on their own merits, in terms of taste, sweetness, uniqueness, texture, and construction, as were the national label bars. Then, the candy bars ruled to be of the same category were contrasted with one another. The Takeout considered how close of a re-creation the Great Value chocolate bars were of the major-label bars in terms of similar taste, texture, and mouthfeel. As the Great Value line exists to provide Walmart customers with lower-cost options, the intrinsic value of the chocolate bars was considered. Of specific interest was whether the customer would be better served by choosing the more expensive name brand product, or the cheaper option was nearly identical and worth buying instead.