In our Taste Test series, BA editors conduct blind comparisons to discover the best supermarket staples (like vanilla ice cream or frozen pizza). Today, which chocolate chips are the most cookie-worthy?
As far as baking essentials go, chocolate chips rank pretty damn high. Besides the eponymous, iconic, and boundary-breaking chocolate chip cookie, they’re also a pivotal add-in for muffins and banana breads—or the perfect snack when you’re craving a bit of chocolate, and somehow find your house otherwise treat-less.
Chocolate chips were first born nearly a century ago. They were invented after Ruth Graves Wakefield, a chef at Toll House in Whitman, Massachusetts, created the first chocolate chip cookies in the 1930s. The cookies were massively popular, but made by supposedly breaking a chocolate bar into chunks. Nestlé approached Wakefield about licensing her recipe (which she reportedly sold for a dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate), and slapped it on the back of their new product: chocolate chips. Now, most people use bagged chocolate chips—morsels, technically—over broken up chocolate bars when they bake chocolate chip cookies.
Today, there are a lot of different chocolates living in the baking aisle of your grocery store. Between dark, milk, white, semisweet, and whatever “super cookie chocolate chip chunks” are, there’s a whole mess of choices. Many chocolate chip cookie recipes call for semisweet chocolate chips, which technically fall under the umbrella of dark chocolate. You may also be familiar with its cousin, bittersweet chocolate, another type of dark chocolate. Both must be made with at least 35% chocolate liquor (liquified cacao nibs that, combined with cocoa butter and solids, make up pure chocolate), though semisweet typically has more sugar.
To find the top-of-the-line, absolute best chocolate chips, we went all out. We put nine brands of semi-sweet chocolate chips through a blind taste test, first trying samples of the chips on their own, then trying them in BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies (which really are spectacular, in case you’ve forgotten). We were looking for a chip with profound cocoa flavor, and a good balance of sweet and bitter. We also wanted chips that were creamy and melty, not chalky or waxy. We also wanted a chip that would make the cookies sing.
After some serious debate, and more than one genuine upset, we found our winner.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Un-Chocolaty: Nestlé Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels
What’s inside: There’s a great debate about chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies. Some argue that chopped up chocolate bars are superior, since they melt into gooey pools, whereas chips hold their form (senior service editor Kelsey Youngman boldly called chocolate chips the “pre-shredded cheese” of the chocolate world). That’s because chocolate chips contain a stabilizer (in Toll House’s case, soy lecithin) to keep the chips intact at higher temperatures.
The verdict: When the brands were revealed after our blind test, there was a gasp when tasters learned Toll House had placed last. We’d hoped it would fare better as a nostalgic favorite, a staple of bake sales, and after-school snacks. There was a distinct herbal, minty note that overpowered much of the chocolate taste. Editorial assistant Nina Moskowitz compared the aftertaste to a teeth cleaning, and food director Chris Morocco went so far as to say it “didn’t really taste like chocolate.”
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Mysteriously Mild: 365 Organic Semi-Sweet Chocolate Baking Chips
What’s inside: 365 chocolate chips are preservative-free with no stabilizers in sight. Just: organic chocolate liquor, organic cane sugar, organic cocoa butter, and organic vanilla extract. Theoretically, they should melt just like fèves, discs, or a chopped up bar of chocolate would inside a cookie.
The verdict: Tasters had good things to say about the texture here. Each chip had a smooth, melt-in-you-mouth effect. But senior service editor Kelsey Youngman said they tasted “vegan” (in a bad way) while senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque was sure they contained coconut oil (she was wrong). Ultimately there just wasn’t enough confident chocolateness here to make 365 a serious contender.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Blatantly Bland: Kirkland Signature Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
What’s inside: Kirkland’s chips contain milk fat, the same ingredient that gives milk chocolate its, well, milkiness. In milk chocolate, milk fat is mainly used to curb the bitterness of the chocolate, but in semisweet chocolate, at much lower levels, it’s also used to make chocolate softer.
The verdict: We were pleasantly surprised at how uniform and deeply cocoa colored Kirkland’s chocolate chips were, silky, like a Michael Bublé song. All signs seemed promising—until first bites. Although the texture wasn’t bad, tasters noticed a distinctly coconutty flavor here too, both in the straight-up chips and the baked cookies. Kirkland simply isn’t chocolaty enough for our liking, although it narrowly beat out 365 based on aesthetics alone.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Confusingly Crumbly: Hershey’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
What’s inside: Hershey’s is known for its kid-friendly, rather sweet chocolate, and its ingredients list seemed to fit the bill. Hershey’s are the only chocolate chips in our taste test that contain both milk and milk fat, suggesting there’s less actual cocoa than in other chocolate chips.
The verdict: A few chews into her first sample, Kelsey whispered “I don’t like it” to no one in particular. That pretty much said it all. Our bites were crumbly, not melty, and tasted vegetal, not bittersweet. Recipe copy and production assistant Carly Westerfield astutely said it tasted like the kind of chocolate used to make candy bars—eerily accurate since the chips were indeed made by Hershey. In a chocolate chip cookie, the Hershey’s chips were pretty good. The vegetal flavors faded as the brown sugar and vanilla in the cookie took center stage.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Definitely Zingy: Trader Joe’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
What’s inside: “Unsweetened chocolate,” is the second ingredient on Trader Joe’s chocolate chips, suggesting that whomever makes these chocolate chips—TJ’s whitelabels many of its products—adds their own cane sugar, cocoa butter, lecithin, and vanilla to create the semisweet blend used in these chips.
The verdict: Trader Joe’s chocolate chips were noticeably bigger than the others we tested. “I wish all of them were like this,” Emma said, speaking of the chips’ heft. The chips melted easily, and were decently chocolaty too, but there were some other flavors at play. Nina noticed a certain “zing” that other tasters identified as a pepperiness almost akin to rye. Altogether the bright flavor wasn’t totally unpleasant, and it faded into the background in the chocolate chip cookie.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Beautifully Bitter: Lily’s Semi-Sweet Style Baking Chips
What’s inside: There’s a lot to investigate on Lily’s ingredients list. This is a no-sugar-added chocolate chip, so there are a few alternative sweeteners present. Some are more familiar like stevia, and some, like inulin, you may not recognize. Inulin is also called chicory root fiber, and in addition to sweetening chocolate, it can stimulate digestion. Erythritol is another sugar alcohol that pops up here, and sunflower lecithin takes the place of the usual soy lecithin that many other chocolate chips use.
The verdict: What our tasters loved about Lily’s chocolate chips is that they weren’t as cloying as the others. They put the semi in semisweet, a true middle ground between milk chocolate and bittersweet chocolate. That bitterness is what made these chips sing in the chocolate chip cookies. They were a welcome contrast in the sugary cookie, and boosted the toasty caramel flavors that we loved. Kelsey described them as “very tannic,” and in the end, that prevented us from ranking these chips any higher.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Impressively Balanced: Guittard Semisweet Baking Chips
What’s inside: Guittard’s packaging proudly proclaims that its chocolate chips are made with 46% cocao, and that it’s dairy-free which means no milk or milk fat. This is pure chocolate, baby. Just cane sugar, cacao beans, cocoa butter, vanilla, and sunflower lecithin—yes, Guittard still includes those preservatives that help the chip keep its shape.
The verdict: Guittard has a major cocoa flavor. Our tasters were over the moon about the intense punch that each chocolate chip packed. These chips were a little smaller and darker in color than a lot of others too. Nina enjoyed that these chips “melted nicely,” but the more we tasted, the more we realized there was something missing: the tangy bitterness that’s the best part of dark chocolate. Kelsey said she wanted more “dark complexity” from a semisweet chocolate chip, and our tasters agreed.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
Luxuriously Chocolaty: Good & Gather Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
What’s inside: No surprises on the ingredients here—sugar, chocolate liquor, milkfat, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, and natural flavor—but one ingredient does stick out: natural flavors. You’ll see it on a lot of chocolate chip ingredients lists (and ingredients lists of a lot of other foods) because it can mean pretty much anything. The FDA describes it as a substance extracted from natural sources plants or animals—pretty broad, but it’s an easy way for a company to hide flavoring additions within their packaging.
The verdict: Well, here we are again. Target’s Good & Gather is in our top three. Can we really be surprised? This brand consistently places well in our taste tests. Good & Gather’s chocolate chips were pretty close to perfect: Chris said they had a “nice balance” between sweet and bitter and Kelsey described their silky melt as “creamy.” These chips would blow you away in a big ole skillet cookie, or perhaps a warm chocolate bread pudding.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Mieko Takahashi
The Standout Winner: Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips
What’s inside: Whole milk powder is listed among the ingredients here, though it’s the third to last ingredient, which suggests Ghirardelli uses less milk-based ingredients than other brands we tested. It’s an ingredient Ghirardeli appears to have started including around seven years ago; it does essentially the same job of milk fat—a creamier flavor and softer texture.
The verdict: In a taste test, when you taste the best, you just know. That was the case here. Upon first chews, our tasters agreed that these chips would be the ones to beat. There wasn’t just a life-changing cocoa flavor. There wasn’t just a velvety melt. There wasn’t juuust an intriguing interplay between bitter and sweet that made our tasters dive for a second bite. What really pushed Ghirardelli into first place was that it went the extra mile—it made our chocolate chip cookie somehow taste better. The more restrained sweet flavor in the chocolate allowed the warm vanilla and brown butter flavors in the cookie to soar to new heights. Chocolate chips are great on their own, but a chocolate chip that can make your baked goods actually taste better—that’s unbeatable.
