Aldi chocolate is a hidden gem. The hazelnut-based chocolate bars are outstanding, and don’t even get me started about the peanut butter cups. Aldi has a fine selection of Regular Buy chocolate, enhanced by a rotating selection of limited buys. Many of those chocolates, like the general Aldi inventory, are obvious imitations of name brands, right down to the packaging.
Enter Moodibars. These chocolate bars are made by Astor Chocolate, one of the sellers of those unpredictable chocolate assortments you see people get on Valentine’s Day. Astor, it turns out, recently started selling these chocolate bars with mood themes. Those moods each represented some twist on the traditional chocolate bar. The “hopeful” bar, for example, had caramel, while the “hangry” bar had jalapeno pretzel.
Aldi must have seen an opportunity here, because it rolled out its own set of mood bars, and they look … a lot like Moodibars.
Choceur Mood Chocolate Bars (Product Code: 707690) are an Aldi Find, which means you can only find them in stores for a limited time. Once they’re sold out, they’re gone, at least until Aldi chooses to bring them back, if ever. And because Aldi doesn’t ship online, if you can’t find them in stores, you won’t be able to get them.
At the time of this post, each bar costs $1.69. That’s less than the $2 a bar that Moodibars go for at World Market. The Choceur bars, like the Moodibars, vary a little in weight, so the price per ounce will differ depending on the chocolate bar.
We saw four versions at Aldi: excited, happy, tired, and winner.
Nutrition information and ingredients: Excited and Happy. (Click to enlarge.)
Nutrition information and ingredients: Tired and Winner. (Click to enlarge.)
Excited
Excited is certainly the most exciting of the four. Embedded in the milk chocolate are small popping candies similar to Pop Rocks, and those sugary crystal candies will crackle in your mouth as you’re eating the chocolate. If you stick your tongue out people around you will hear it, but I could also hear them in my own head as I was eating them.
Happy
The Happy bars are your typical chocolate and caramel combination. They’re not exactly revolutionary, but they’re good. Both main ingredients are smooth and sweet. Watch out for gooey strings of caramel as you break apart the perforated chocolate bar sections.
Tired
If you were hoping for dark chocolate with coffee flavor, that’s exactly what you get. These caffeinated bars combine both the distinctive flavor of dark chocolate with the distinctive flavor of espresso beans. There’s some interesting crunch here from ground coffee beans, but it’s not too hard and reminds us a bit of a chocolate bar with crispy rice, such as Nestle Crunch, but with a coffee flavor added.
Winner
I didn’t exactly come away feeling like these were true s’mores, but they do have a fun crumbly interior texture with a hint of marshmallow and graham cracker flavor to them. Both the milk chocolate and the granular insides taste good.
The Verdict:
I personally have a hard time finding Moodibars or other mood bars to be much more than a marketing thing, but I will admit that these chocolate bars are pretty good. At worst, they would make for a nice gift chocolate, but they are also perhaps worth packing with lunch if you want a pick-me-up. Which one you like best will depend on your tastes — we think that all of them, though, taste as advertised.
