Popular Chocolate Chip Brands Ranked Worst To Best

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Chocolate is one of life's great foods. If it weren't, Americans wouldn't consume 2.8 billion pounds of the stuff annually (via the Chocolate Store), the equivalent of 11 pounds of chocolate per person every year. When you take chocolate and make it into tiny, bite-sized morsels, even better. We're obsessed with the intersection of tiny cute things and chocolate; the combination is impossible to refuse. It's no wonder, then, that chocolate chip cookies are so popular in America.

Chocolate chips were actually created by Nestlé, a Swiss company, based on the popularity of an American treat. After Ruth Wakefield invented the Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie using chopped up pieces of chocolate bars, Nestlé saw a business opportunity and bought the rights to the recipe, which it printed on its bars' wrappers. The company released bags of chocolate morsels — which we now know as chips — beginning in 1940 (via Mental Floss).

Now, the market is practically overrun with chocolate chips, which is not a bad problem to have until it comes time to pick your brand. Depending on what you're cooking (or if you're just eating them plain), some chocolate chips are better than others. Let us help you sift through several well-known options so you get the best possible chocolate chips, starting with the worst and working our way toward true chocolate excellency.

Enjoy Life has the niche chocolate chip market covered for chocolate chips. They are gluten-free and vegan. They are free from 14 different common allergens, including wheat, casein, mustard, shellfish, peanuts, soy, lupin, crustaceans, tree nuts, eggs, added sulfites, dairy, sesame, and fish. Advertising all of these seems a bit excessive, considering many of these ingredients likely wouldn't be anywhere near chocolate chips anyway. But it does allow for peace of mind for the purchaser, which is exactly what the company was going for. Enjoy Life was founded under the principle that everyone should be able to enjoy foods without worry.

To do this, Enjoy Life keeps it simple. There are only three ingredients to these chocolate chips: cane sugar, unsweetened chocolate, and cocoa butter. In this instance, less is not more. The chocolate chips themselves have a crumbly texture that makes them almost chalky. They are also incredibly sweet. While they bake up okay, and you might not notice too much of the sweetness when paired with an already sweet dessert, you definitely wouldn't want to eat these on their own. They are also more expensive than many competitors, landing them far down in our ranking.

First of all, we are almost offended by how expensive these chocolate chips are. As of April 2022, an 8-ounce bag at Walmart costs $11.99. For context, a 12-ounce bag of Nestlé Chocolate Morsels from Walmart is $2.48. NaTivo's mission is to provide all-natural and healthy foods for the family. Unfortunately, that only works if you want to eat them. We know we were just complaining about chocolate chips being too sweet, but these taste like there is nothing in them at all. If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, then there is no getting these down. They are notably bitter.

The NaTivo chocolate chips are branded as all-natural, sugar-free, kosher, keto, and produced in the United States. Instead of sugar, the chips contain allulose sweetener. This may be great for people keeping to a keto diet or requiring less sugar, but as they're more than seven times the price per ounce, you won't find us picking these chocolate chips up anytime soon.

We really like Hershey's products; the Special Dark Chocolate Bar is *chef's kiss.* For the money, you can't beat it. But what of the company's chocolate chips? Still delicious, but not quite up to the standards of its other products.

Like Whole Foods 365, Hershey's chocolate chips come in a wide variety of flavors. Using the most common, semi-sweet, as our base metric left us mildly underwhelmed. Hershey's Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips are definitely on the sweet side. They melt and bake well, but for snacking, they are not quite what we are looking for.

Thankfully, Hershey's also makes chocolate chips using its delicious Special Dark chocolate. These are definitely snacking-worthy, and we highly recommend them. These chips do contain a lot of ingredients, including common allergens such as soy and dairy. And the inconsistency across the individual chips mean they can't rank any higher. But if you find those Special Dark chips, do yourself a favor and pick up a pack.

Popular grocery chain Kroger brings its A-game when it comes to chocolate chips. Well okay, maybe not its A-game, but a solid B-game. Its house brand Private Selection makes a 43% Cacao Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chip that is both tasty and price-effective, making it one of our top picks for grocery store chocolate chips.

At 43%, Private Selection is on the low end of cacao content for chocolate chips. Nestlé Semi-Sweet contains 53% (according to Grouper Sandwich), which you would think would make a better, more chocolaty chip, but it does not. We like the Private Selection better than the name-brand counterpart. Private Selection is smooth and creamy — not chalky — and while it is sweet, it also has a pleasant, chocolatey taste. We also appreciate that, unlike other similarly priced chocolate chips, there is nothing artificial in these. They are simply sugar, unsweetened chocolate, cocoa butter, milk fat, soy lecithin, and vanilla extract.

SunSpire Chocolate Chips are a conscious choice. The chips are Fair Trade-certified; this means that the chocolate that SunSpire uses to produce its product was grown ethically, with the people harvesting the cocoa beans receiving at least the Fair Trade Minimum Price for their product. The chocolate trade is known to be unjust, and to know that SunSpire chips weren't part of that makes them even sweeter in our eyes.

The taste hearkens to more of the natural roots of chocolate; instead of tasting like sugar and sugar alone, you are actually able to tell the base of chocolate is a plant. Some people may not like this earthy flavor, but to us, this is preferable to the overly sweet, more common brands out there. The chips are kosher and organic, but do contain soy lecithin. Overall, though, we don't have much to complain about when it comes to SunSpire.

Guittard: The name itself oozes smoothness. Guittard was founded in San Francisco in 1868 by Etienne Guittard. Originally coming to California in hopes to strike it big in the gold rush, he soon learned that his family business was worth its weight in gold. Over the past 150 years, Guittard has earned quite a reputation for itself and its wonderful chocolate. The company is in its fifth generation and is still owned by the Guittard family.

Guittard offers a wide range of baking chips, from sweet milk chocolate to an entirely unsweetened dark chocolate that is 100% cacao. We tried the semi-sweet and extra dark varieties and found them wonderfully flavorful. Finally, a chip that isn't just sweet, mild chocolate! Both offered rich, nuanced flavors with tastes of fruitiness and nuttiness showing through, creating a complex flavor profile that lingers on the tongue. The chocolate is incredibly smooth and melts like a dream. Guittard uses sunflower lecithin instead of soy, and the chips are produced in a nut-free facility. Most of their cacao beans are sourced from West Africa and South America and are Fair Trade-certified. With so many chocolate chip options to try, we were hard-pressed to find better options.

Look, we are going to level with you. The Ghirardelli chocolate chips are good, even great. They are earthy and complex, offering up more of the rich, funky flavors we like to see. But we know when you get to this level, it is hard to distinguish between personal taste and quality. While other chocolates might technically be a higher quality, we still feel Ghirardelli earns its place at No. 2 on our list. 

Spending absurd amounts of money on incredibly high-quality chocolate would be a waste when you have Ghirardelli available at an affordable price at most grocery stores. The brand's semi-sweet chocolate chips are absolutely delicious. They'll take your baking adventures to the next level. Ghirardelli's chocolate chips are made with basic ingredients, and the company operates from what it calls "bean to chip," taking cocoa beans all the way to their magical finished product. For the price and availability, Ghirardelli knocks it out of the park. And you should expect nothing less from a company that has been around since 1852.