Kit Kat Vs Walmart's Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafer Bar - Which Is Better?
In 1935, a chocolate wafer candy of prestige, of honor, of England was born to the world. Known as the Kit Kat, this posh treat has delighted us with its taste and the wild and wacky flavors only available in Japan. In 2023, our favorite chocolate wafer candy bar got a discount brother. Last year, Walmart's clan of Mars candy knockoffs arrived on the scene, including copies of classics like Twix, Snickers, and Three Musketeers. Among them, with a name you have to take a deep breath to say, was the Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafers Bar. Some people on the interwebs have claimed Walmart's version actually tastes better than the treat it copies. Today, we're putting these whispers to the test.
We bought a Kit Kat and a Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafers Bar, and instead of just comparing how close the knockoff resembled the original, pitted them against each other in a chocolatey candy free-for-all to see which was the superior chocolate wafer bar. We judged these two in six categories: price, chocolate quality, wafer snap, chocolate-to-wafer ratio, and taste. We declared one bar a winner of each division, but only one stood out as the best chocolate wafer candy at Walmart. Here are the results.
Price
Before we get into the bars themselves, for purposes of science and, most importantly, savings, it is our sworn duty to examine exactly how good a deal you're getting if you opt out of a Kit Kat and swing for a Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafers Bar — though keep in mind the prices may vary by region.
While Kit Kats are available in a multitude of sizes from individual to king size form, Walmart's wafer bar can only be bought as an individually wrapped solo act, a pack of six individually wrapped candy baddies, or in ultimate king size form. But while Great Value has fewer candy size options than the Kit Kat brand, those fewer variations are also far cheaper than their Kit Kat counterparts.
An individual Kit Kat is priced at around $1.32, whereas an individual Great Value bar goes for $.78. You could also opt to buy the equivalent of 6 full-size Kit Kats by snagging a half-dozen Great Value bars at a price point of $2.98 — which, while inconvenient for grab and go snacking, is the better deal. And while a king size Kit Kat costs $2.28, the Great Value bar costs $1.34. So, in terms of price, Great Value's milk chocolate wafer bar is the clear victor –– as it very well should be.
Size
When it comes to the Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafers, the price is for sure right. But that brings up the age-old question — how did Great Value cut the bar's cost? Do these treats skimp out on volume? The answer is yes, when compared to a Kit Kat, Wally's wafer bars are smaller. But not by much.
Per the labels of the treats, a standard Kit Kat is 1.5 ounces and the copycat is 1.48. When we first unwrapped the two candy bars, we could tell the Great Value wafer treat was smaller than the Kit Kat, but that's only because we were looking really, really hard. That is to say, the average consumer likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two sizes. But when we compared the two side by side and stacked the bars on top of each other to see if they were the same length and width, the Kit Kat was not only slightly larger in overall width but its chocolate wafer fingers were also ever so slightly longer than Great Value's budget-friendly bar. And so Kit Kat is our wafer bar brand Goliath, while dear Great Value is resigned to David status.
Chocolate quality
A chocolate wafer candy is only as good as its chocolate, right? On a related note, post-taste test, it's very obvious where Great Value cut its wafer candies' cost.
Now, the Great Value Milk Chocolate Crispy Wafer's chocolate isn't bad, per se, it's just not great. While it's passably sweet and chocolatey, you can also immediately tell it's made with cheap stuff. It has the more sugar than chocolate taste of those chocolate coins you probably forgot existed. The bar's chocolate has the signature almost plastic aftertaste of cheap chocolate candy. Unfortunately for Great Value, the eh-it'll-do quality of its wafer candy's chocolate was only emphasized by the creamy sweetness of its rival Kit Kat.
The Kit Kat, in true name-brand glory, was covered in a chocolate that tasted like sweet, Mars-standard milk chocolate bliss. Its high quality shone through in its smoothness. As such, Kit Kat is the king of the chocolate category.
Wafer snap
Having had the nightmarish experience of recently trying a stale Kit Kat, we can say with confidence that there is nothing worse than dry wafer candy. Luckily, neither the Great Value wafer candy bar nor the Kit Kat we sampled for this article made us relive our trauma. However, one of our candy bar duo's wafers was the stuff of beauty — and it wasn't the Kit Kat's.
The Kit Kat's wafer was very crispy when we tasted it. However, the candy bar's chocolate, while creamy and wonderful, completely overpowers the wafer within. You usually have to get halfway through a wafer before it starts to get crunchy. Overall, it's not all that crunchy or crispy a wafer candy, but, on account of its chocolate, almost chewy.
Now, enter our champ, the Great Value chocolate wafer bar. We were sure that Walmart, after cutting corners on the candy bar's chocolate, would cheap out on this aspect of its candy as well, but we were surprised to find that the wafer within the candy bar's chocolate layer was tantalizingly light and crisp. To emphasize how much we aren't joshing you, we have to disclose that when we dug into this wafer candy, we could hear ourselves crunching. So while Kit Kat has the Great Value chocolate wafer bar beat in terms of sheer chocolate quality, it is the Great Value chocolate wafer that excels in the realm of crunchy wafer superstardom.
Chocolate-to-wafer ratio
We firmly believe that in this type of candy bar, there should be enough chocolate to coat the wafers and a light layer in between each one, but not too much to overpower them. However, Kit Kat doesn't feel the same way.
It was obvious the Kit Kat was heavy on chocolate. When we turned the bar over, no traces of wafers poked through the back of the candy, and when we snapped a chocolate finger from its three brethren we couldn't even see wafer traces poking through the sides. We'd argue Kit Kat is too generous with its chocolate portioning. As you may have guessed based on our critique about the candy's wafers, you can barely taste the Kit Kat bar's crunchy main show because of the amount of chocolate the wafer's surrounded by, making it more of a chocolate bar with some wafer in it than a wafer chocolate bar.
But that is not the case for our less costly friend, Great Value. The bar's ratio of chocolate to wafer is far superior to Kit Kat's. There is plenty of chocolate to enjoy without overpowering the wafer, so you can actually savor, rather than search for, the wafer in this candy bar snack.
Taste
We've kept you in suspense long enough. Components and price aside, what do these wafer chocolate bars actually taste like? We have to say, both are pretty darn good.
The Kit Kat is all about its delicious chocolate. Sweet, silky, and smooth, biting into a Kit Kat bar is like enjoying a milk chocolate treat from Wonka's famous factory. But, as we mentioned before, while the chocolate is good, the Kit Kat's wafer is lost in a sea of sweet, sugary cocoa. There are small pieces of crispness of the wafer throughout, but even accounting for the fact that some fingers are crunchier than others, the bar lacks the consistent crunch we crave from a wafer chocolate candy treat.
Great Value's take on this candy — likely because its chocolate is not name-brand quality — is all about the crunch of its crispy wafer. While the chocolate in this off-brand treat isn't nearly as delicious as Kit Kat's, in this candy bar, neither the wafer nor the chocolate is overpowering. Great Value's bar combines just the right amount of very average chocolate with an above-average crunchy wafer. The combination made us want to keep on crunching through the entire six-pack of bars. Great Value stole the flavor show.
Don't sleep on Great Value wafer bars
In the great clash of the wafer bars, we have a clear winner. While the Kit Kat beat out its knockoff in terms of chocolate quality and size, the Great Value wafer bar whupped its name-brand foe in literally every other category — and the reason for Great Value's unlikely victory can be summed up by one simple factor. It is not the chocolate taste alone that makes the wafer bar, but how well the chocolate and wafer elements do or don't combine.
The Kit Kat, while tasty, relied too heavily on its wonderful chocolate. While some fingers of our Kit Kat were crunchier than others, for the most part, it tasted more like a chocolate bar that a couple of wafers happened to trip their way into than a chocolate wafer candy bar. But while the Great Value's chocolate was less delicious, it was still flavorful, and when combined with the absolute deliciousness of its crunchy wafer, it became a munchy, chocolate wafer treat you just can't stop eating. So because this a test of which of these two brands makes the superior wafer candy bar, for its masterful chocolate-to-wafer ratio and delicious taste, Great Value's milk chocolate wafer candy bar stands over its fallen, name-brand enemy, the Kit Kat.