The Popular Peanut Butter Cup Brand We Rank Last For Flavor

The peanut butter cup is a simple but delicious candy, perfectly mixing the sweetness and slight bitterness of chocolate with the savoriness of peanut butter. It's been around for almost 100 years now, ever since H.B. Reese (of Reese's fame) concocted it in 1928, so it's no surprise that there are so many versions of it now, made by so many brands.

Seeing an opportunity, Daily Meal had a writer taste test 11 brands' versions to suss out which cups stand as tall as the Stanley, and which aren't worth their weight in sugar. It should come as no surprise to you that Reese's was in the top three, but what sadly was a surprise was the last place "winner" from Lily's. It's a "healthier sweets" brand committed to not using refined or processed sugars, among other excellent goals to strive for such as being Fair Trade. Unfortunately, these same noble goals are a big part of what makes its peanut butter cups better left on the shelf with your elf.

The biggest flaw of Lily's peanut butter cups is their use of stevia as an alternative sweetener, to avoid the use of unhealthier sugars. Some don't mind stevia and in fact, prefer it because of its near-zero amount of calories and carbs compared to the nutritional content of more common sugars. Others can't get past its flavor, finding it bitter, menthol-like, or licorice-like. It's similar to how some people like cilantro, but others think it tastes like soap.

Making matters worse, especially on the bitterness front of stevia, is the heavy bitterness of the chocolate Lily's uses. Normally, those processed sugars we know and love help cut down on chocolate's natural bitterness, so using a partially bitter sweetener such as stevia means that doesn't get accomplished nearly as well. The cups may have shifted away from this bitterness slightly since the taste because Lily's recently moved away from the 40% cacao it used to use for its milk chocolate to a now lower 36% cacao. Still, the stevia remains, so even if it is less bitter upfront, you're still fighting that stevia aftertaste. If you really want to try a peanut butter cup that isn't Reese's, we'd suggest our first-place winner: Aldi's Choceur.