Last Updated: October 6, 2022
Best Chocolate In The World (Swiss, Belgian & ?)
Have you ever asked yourself who makes the best chocolate? Everyone loves chocolate, I mean have you ever met anyone who doesn’t? Whether it’s milk chocolate you love, praline, dark chocolate surrounding a hazelnut, or even white chocolate, we have got you covered.
Join me as we take a dive into the best chocolate in the world. We’ll cover everything from fancy chocolate brands that you can find in your local supermarket to luxury chocolate brands as well as famous chocolate makers from across the world.
With Christmas on the horizon, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to grab a box of one of the premium chocolate brands below.
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Teuscher
If you love Swiss chocolate then you might have heard of Teuscher but if you haven’t then you really need to try some Teuscher chocolate.
Teuscher chocolate started out with top chocolatier Dolf Teuscher who traveled the globe in search of only the best ingredients in order to make the world’s best chocolate. He took the best cocoa, nuts, fruits, he found on his travels and return with them to a small village in the Swiss Alps to blend them into his own recipes.
Now 70 years later, Dolf Teuscher’s recipes have been handed down to his son and production has now moved to Zurich. The Teuscher chocolatiers in Zurich make hundreds of varieties of chocolates following Dolf’s original recipes. They still use top-quality ingredients to make the best quality chocolate which has no preservatives chemicals, or additives.
Their most famous chocolates include a combination of chocolate, butter, fresh cream, and champagne to make a champagne truffle that just melts in your mouth.
You’ll find Teuscher stores all over the world and chocolates are flown to all of them from the central Teuscher kitchen in Zurich.
Godiva Chocolatier
Godiva is one of the top luxury chocolate brands the world over and they have been going for a while. Godiva started out in the 1920s at a chocolate-making course in Brussels, Belgium which was run by the Draps family.
Their chocolate, which was mainly typical Belgian praline was sold in all the super fashionable spots around Brussels. It wasn’t until Joseph Draps joined the family business at just 14 years of age when things started to change.
He took his time becoming a top chocolatier and as he progressed he also honed his business skills. When he was ready he decided to make a prestigious chocolate range and he called in Godiva. Godiva chocolates were sold in gold boxes and the chocolates were divine. This combination of great marketing and delicious chocolate was the key to Godiva’s success.
Today Godiva supplies the Court of Belgium with chocolate and they continue to sell their amazing tastes of heaven all over the world. Some of their best sellers include their signature truffles, dark chocolate boxes, and even chocolate-covered pretzels.
Richart
Richart is one of the best fine chocolate brands in the world the company was developed by the chocolate-loving Richart family who makes the best chocolate in the world. Based in Paris, Richart only uses the best ingredients to make the most delicious chocolates.
The chocolate these famous chocolate makers produce is so good that it’s won the Ruban Bleu seven times. The Ruban Bleu is pretty much France’s top chocolatier award, and winning it seven times is no joke!
The Richart family hasn’t stopped being creative despite already conquering the art of making incredible chocolate. They now focus on designs, colors, and packing amazing flavors into their already delicious chocolate.
Today they make everything from macaroons to beautifully decorated boxes of dark chocolate, truffles, and Pates Des Fruits. You can even buy a chocolate vault that comes with humidity and temperature controls plus seven drawers of chocolate.
Puccini Bomboni
Puccini Bomboni is based out of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and they are known as the top chocolatier in the country. For a long time, you had to go to Amsterdam to try this delicious chocolate as they are all made on premises at a lovely little cafe/restaurant in the city, and they never used to deliver.
Today, you can order their chocolates and online and they deliver to both Europe and the US. Plus, they have expanded from just one cafe to three with another one in Amsterdam and one in Utrecht.
Puccini Bomboni makes some of the most delicious combinations of chocolate with spices, fruit, nuts, biscuits, and more. Their specialty is a bonbon and they only used the best ingredients and masterful process to create them. They also love them so much, that their emotional connection to them is quite serious and they want to fill everyone with joy who tries them.
As well as bonbons, their famous chocolate makers also make vegan chocolate, lovely selections in boxes, seasonal specials, and lots more.
Valrhona
Valrhona is one of the original find chocolate brands and they have been making requisite chocolate from as afar back as 1922.
Based in France, this top chocolatier was the first to treat chocolate like wine and began creating chocolates that stated origins from the cocoa bean to the bar it was in. You can find chocolate from a single cocoa estate, single cocoa region, and even vintage chocolate.
Valrhona takes its sustainability seriously and they buy their cocoa beans directly from the farmers. They only work with the plantations that produce the best cocoa and source from the Caribbean, Pacific, and South America.
Valrhona has a large range of delicious chocolates from chocolate bars from a single origin to chocolate pastries, an assortment of chocolate boxes mixed with fruit and nuts for additional textures and flavors, plus a lot more.
Vosges Haut-Chocolat
Vosges Haut-Chocolat is one of the US’s favorite luxury chocolate brands and it’s based out of Chicago. The company is owned by top chocolatier Katrina Markoff and can you guess where she learned the art of making chocolate? That’s right, it was in France.
She went to Le Cordon Bleu, a school of French confectionery in Paris to learn to become a master at making delicious chocolate. After she graduated, she joined a lot of apprenticships around the world and eventually started her own brand, Vosges Haut-Chocolat.
Vosges Haut-Chocolat specializes in infusing rare flowers and spices with delicious cholate truffles and some of the best-sellers are Argentinean dulce de leche and Mexican vanilla bean.
Today, Vosges Haut-Chocolat sends amazing chocolates all around the world and they only use the best ingredients. Katrina Markoff hand-picks every flower, spice, and cocoa that enters the kitchen to ensure the chocolate is always top quality.
Lindt & Sprungli
One of the luxury chocolate brands we all know is Lindt (officially Lindt & Sprungli) and they do make some of the best chocolate one can find in supermarkets and the world over.
Lindt started out making chocolate in Zurich was back in 1845 and since then, they have only used the best ingredients to create their delicious chocolates. The great thing about Lindt chocolate is that it’s actually very affordable while being delicious.
If you have tried a Lindt truffle, then you’ll know how good they are. As soon as they enter your mouth, they start melting and you have more than 20 flavors to choose from. As well as truffles, Lindt also makes delicious bars, liqueurs, and even ice cream.
Norman Love Confections
Based out of Fort Myers in Florida, Norman Love Confections makes some of the best-looking chocolate on the planet. Started by Norman Love, a man with a passion for chocolate that is great than most people in the world, Norman Love Confections specializes in making chocolate look as good as it tastes, which ain’t easy.
Together with his partner, Norman Love and his chocolate partner worked out how to create colorful designs for every chocolate bar or sweet. This process involves a lot of hand-painted effort as well as airbrushing molds which the chocolate is then added to.
Normal Love Confections doesn’t actually make chocolate, they make the cover the chocolate goes in, and they import only the finest chocolate from France, Belgium, and Switzerland.
You can order a selection of chocolates online and there is quite a range to choose from. Norman’s recipes use ingredients like ginger, passionfruit, bananas, hazelnuts, and lots more, so the chocolates taste pretty amazing if you can bear to destroy their artistic shells.
Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker
Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker is a little different from your traditional chocolatiers as they specialize in source to bar plus adding pairings, and making cooking chocolate.
Based out of Berkeley, California, Scharffen Berger Chocolate takes things very seriously and managed every part of the process from handpicking their cocoa beans to wrapping the chocolate bars before they get sold.
Their cocoa selection methods are what make each bar of chocolate have its own unique taste. They approach chocolate a bit like coffee, blending cocoa from different regions to create new flavors. They use only sustainable and top-quality ingredients in their chocolate and artisanal manufacturing methods.
You can order Scharffen Berger chocolates online and you have a choice of cooking chocolate, chocolate bars, and pairings. The pairings chocolate is their quality chocolate paired with another ingredient such as manchego, scotch, Armagnac, and even Guatemalan coffee – that’s how specific it gets. Check out their pairing menu here.
Guylian
Guylian is by far one of my favorite luxury chocolate brands. They are best known for their hazelnut praline seashells that melt in your mouth and are absolutely delicious but the story behind them is even sweeter.
Guy (the Guy in Guylian) Foubert, a master chocolatier from Belgium married his lady Liliane (the Lian in Guylian), another master chocolatier.
After they were married, they came up with the Guylian seashells with Guy creating the hazelnut praline filling while Liliane made the shining marbled exterior and the delicately sculptured sea shell shapes for it to go in. The combination of white and dark chocolate used on the outside of the seashells was a symbol of their entwined love for each other.
Since their seashells exploded across the world they have also developed a lot more amazing chocolates including bars, truffles, coated fruits, and master boxes of Belgian chocolate called a Belgian Masters collection. They have even made a No Added Sugar range as well as Guylian Temptations.
Richard Donnelly Fine Chocolates
Richard Donnelly Fine Chocolates is based out of Santa Cruz, California and they are one of those luxury chocolate brands that like to push boundaries by combing top-quality chocolate with daring ingredients such as early grey tea and saffron.
This top chocolatier only uses the best French and Belgian chocolate to create his new inventions and some of the most interesting bars feature cardamom, lavender, and ever chipotle.
This kind of daring thing and experimentation is what has made Richard Donnelly Fine Chocolates so successful and he even won the Best Artisan award at the prestigious Euro Chocolate Festival in Perugia, Italy.
The top chocolatier only makes 50lbs of chocolate per day, showing just how much care goes into each bit. You can order the chocolate online and you don’t have to try the daring chocolates, you can also find bars with “normal ingredients” such as macadamia nuts, honey, and vanilla. They even make ice cream bars now too, which you should try.
Jacques Torres Chocolate
Jacques Torres Chocolate is renowned as the top chocolatier in New York City. When you hang out at Jacques Torres stores, you feel like you’ve stepped into an artisan chocolate shop in Paris. It’s so inviting, the best way to eat the amazing chocolate is in the shop sipping a signature hot chocolate with a fresh French pastry on the side.
Jacques Torres’ specialty is fresh hand-made chocolate and if you want to eat some of it on the day, then you’ll have to go to the store, that’s how fresh it is. While in the store you can watch master chocolatiers making their fresh creations live behind glass windows. When you order online, you’ll have to wait 2-3 days for your selection to be made fresh and then shipped to you!
Jacques Torres’s chocolate range features bonbons, truffles, bars, boxes, vegan, kosher and lot’s more. There are three chocolate shops in New York and one more in Atlantic City at Harrah’s.
Ferrero Rocher
If you have a nut allergy, I feel incredibly sorry for you as you will never have tried a Ferrero Rocher chocolate. Ferrero Rocher’s boxes of golden-wrapped chocolates are the most gifted box of chocolates in the world and are thought to be the best-selling chocolate around the world.
It’s understandable why. The combination of a smooth chocolate-covered hazelnut center in a wafer mold which is then covered in chocolate and hazelnut shavings is pretty hard to beat. It’s certainly my favorite chocolate in the supermarket along with Ritter Sport.
Ferrero Rocher doesn’t just make their golden balls of deliciousness, you can also buy Ferrero Rocher bars made from dark, milk, and white chocolate, and of course, a lot of hazelnuts.
Ferrero Rocher started in 1982 and the Italian chocolate maker took its time to create something that not only tasted delicious but captured the senses in both texture and packaging. The company is committed to sustainability and always uses the best ingredients for their assumptions hazelnut chocolates.
Ritter Sport
Ritter Sport is a German company that was started way back in 1912 and they make some of the best affordable chocolate in the world in my opinion. The business was started by a couple, Alfred E. and Clara Ritter, who were chocolatiers, and by 1926 the company had grown from 2 to 80 employees.
Ritter Sport got its name from being designed as a bar of chocolate that would fit into the pocket of a sports coat, which was Clara’s idea. Today this family-run business has exploded across the world and they make a huge range of different chocolate bars using only the best and sustainable ingredients.
My favorite Ritter Sport bar is the dark chocolate hazelnut bar but there are tons of flavors including marzipan, butterscotch, biscuit, cornflakes, praline, cocoa mousse, strawberry yogurt, and even dark almond and orange.
Toblerone
Last but not least and one that couldn’t be left off the list is Toblerone. Toblerone is about as Swiss as chocolate can get as its triangular shape is based on their favorite mountain, the Matterhorn. Toberlone has been one of the best-selling chocolates on the market since it first came out which is over one hundred years ago.
The key taste of Toblerone comes from their combination of honey and nougat which they then combine with the best milk, white, and dark Swiss chocolate. They recently started adding more to their chocolate too and if you haven’t tried an Almond Toblerone then you really have to.
When Toblerone first came out it was so expensive that only royalty could afford it but now we all can!
About the Author Anna Timbrook
Anna is the co-owner of expert world travel and can't wait to share her travel experience with the world. With over 54 countries under her belt she has a lot to write about! Including those insane encounters with black bears in Canada.
