We all have that one candy bar we’d quietly slip back into the Halloween bowl when nobody’s looking. Maybe it’s the one your weird uncle always hands out, or the bar that somehow ends up as the last survivor in the office candy dish. But which candy bars are officially, provably, backed-by-data the worst ones you can buy? Multiple rankings, taste tests, and surveys have tackled this exact question — and the results are both satisfying and a little heartbreaking. Some of these bars are American institutions. Doesn’t mean they’re good.
Let’s work through the worst offenders, starting with the merely disappointing and ending with the bar that every ranking seems to agree belongs in last place.
Milky Way
Milky Way isn’t a disaster. It’s just kind of… there. In a January 2025 taste test that ranked 16 popular candy bars, Milky Way landed in the forgettable middle-bottom zone. The dominant flavor is caramel, and there’s way too much of it. It creates this sticky, chewy situation that makes your jaw work harder than any candy bar should require. The nougat? It adds almost nothing flavor-wise and just makes the texture gummy. And the chocolate coating doesn’t taste particularly high-quality either.
Milky Way is the candy bar equivalent of a movie you’ve seen three times but can never remember the plot of. It’s fine. It’s just not worth choosing when literally anything else is available.
Heath Bar
Heath bars have a concept problem. They take toffee — which, let’s be honest, is already a divisive candy — break it into pieces, and cover it in milk chocolate. The toffee flavor isn’t even that strong, which defeats the whole purpose. What you’re left with is sticky, flavorless shards cemented to your molars. It’s less of a treat and more of a dental event.
Here’s the kicker: Heath bars are made by Hershey, which explains the chocolate quality issue. We’ll get to Hershey more in a minute, but their chocolate is a recurring problem across multiple products. When your toffee doesn’t taste like toffee and your chocolate doesn’t taste like chocolate, you’ve got a candy bar with an identity crisis.
Butterfinger
Butterfinger is one of those love-it-or-hate-it bars with absolutely no middle ground. The unusual flaky texture inside comes from corn flakes mixed into peanut butter, then combined with a sweet crystallized molasses mixture before getting dipped in chocolate. If that sounds weird, it’s because it is weird.
The peanut butter flavor is so aggressive it overpowers everything else in the bar. You’re basically eating a peanut butter bomb with some chocolate window dressing. For people who want a balanced candy experience — some sweetness, some crunch, some chocolate richness — Butterfinger just screams one note at full volume. And those flaky bits get everywhere. Your car, your shirt, wedged between your teeth for the next three hours.
PayDay
PayDay holds the unusual distinction of being the only major candy bar that contains zero chocolate. That’s right — it’s just peanuts packed around a caramel center, and nothing else. The caramel core is tough and sticky, almost like chewing on sweetened rubber cement. It leaves this unpleasant residue on your back teeth that lingers way longer than you want it to.
The peanuts are salty but don’t do the bar any favors. The whole thing just doesn’t come together into something you’d actually want to eat. PayDay feels like someone started making a candy bar, ran out of chocolate, and said “ship it anyway.”
Mr. Goodbar
Mr. Goodbar has been around since 1925, when Hershey’s launched it and actually marketed it during the Great Depression as a nutritional lunch option. A lunch! Because it has peanuts! The Depression was rough, but that’s still a stretch.
Nearly a century later, Mr. Goodbar still hasn’t figured out its ratio problem. Every bite has too many peanuts and not enough chocolate. And the chocolate that’s there isn’t rich or creamy — it’s that same Hershey’s base that keeps showing up on worst lists. From a health angle, it’s no winner either. One bar packs 260 calories, 17 grams of fat (8 of them saturated), and 23 grams of sugar. Those Depression-era marketing claims about nutrition didn’t age well, considering the peanuts are coated in fat and fried.
3 Musketeers
Here’s where things get spicy. An Instagram poll posted with the caption “One Halloween Candy Must Go” found that 3 Musketeers was the clear frontrunner for most hated. Sales data from Candystore.com backed it up — most states don’t even bother buying the bar. The only state where 3 Musketeers qualifies as popular? Mississippi. One out of fifty. That’s a brutal stat.
The bar is just whipped nougat covered in milk chocolate. No caramel, no nuts, no pretzels, nothing. When it was first manufactured in 1932, it actually contained three small bars in chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla flavors — hence the name. But World War II cost-cutting killed the strawberry and vanilla pieces, and they never came back. So now it’s just one flavor of fluffy nothing.
The sugar content is staggering. A full-sized bar contains 36 grams of sugar. The American Heart Association recommends a maximum of 36 grams per day for men and 25 grams for women. One bar and you’ve blown your entire daily budget. For comparison, you’d have to eat 10 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to match the sugar in just 2.8 full-size 3 Musketeers bars.
Nougat shows up in plenty of other candy bars — Snickers, Milky Way, Baby Ruth — but those bars surround it with caramel, nuts, and other ingredients that make things interesting. 3 Musketeers is just nougat standing alone, fully exposed, with nothing to distract you from how boring it is.
Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar
And here it is. Dead last. The worst candy bar in America, according to a blind taste test that evaluated 16 popular bars on taste, texture, and ingredient quality. The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar came in at number 16 out of 16.
This is the candy bar that basically invented the American candy bar. Hershey’s is one of the oldest chocolate manufacturers in the country, an iconic brand that shaped an entire industry. And its original product is now the worst version of what it created.
The chocolate tastes cheap and bland. It’s not creamy. It’s rough, almost waxy. There’s none of the richness you’d expect from even a halfway decent chocolate bar. The sugar content doesn’t help — it just makes everything taste flat and one-dimensional. When you eat a Dove bar, or even something from Aldi’s chocolate aisle, you can immediately feel the difference. The Hershey’s bar is playing a different, much worse game.
Here’s what makes the ranking so damning: every other candy bar on the lower end of the spectrum at least has something else going on. Butterfinger has its weird flaky peanut butter thing. PayDay has its peanut exterior. Even 3 Musketeers has the novelty of fluffy nougat. The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar is just chocolate — and when that chocolate isn’t good, there’s nowhere to hide. It stands naked with nothing to distract from its low-quality base.
Social media opinions are split — some people still defend the classic bar with genuine affection. One Reddit user said “Nothing better than a good old fashioned Hershey bar,” while another countered with “It’s decent but that’s about it.” Interestingly, almost everyone agrees the Hershey’s with almonds version is significantly better. Adding almonds gives the bar something to lean on beyond its mediocre chocolate.
So What Should You Actually Buy?
If you’re wondering what lands on the other end of these rankings, the answer is consistent across almost every list. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups dominate — they earned more than half the votes in one nationwide study as America’s most beloved Halloween candy. Snickers is always in the top three. And in a Reddit-based ranking that analyzed hundreds of comments, 100 Grand took the number one spot, which genuinely surprised everyone. One commenter who recently moved to the U.S. from another country said it was their favorite American candy bar — so maybe fresh eyes see something we’ve been overlooking.
The lesson from all of this? Nostalgia is powerful, but it doesn’t make chocolate taste better. The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar built an empire, defined a category, and became an American symbol. Then everyone else figured out how to do it better, and Hershey’s never caught up. Once you try the alternatives — even cheap alternatives — it’s hard to go back.
