Last Updated on December 17, 2021
EDITOR’S NOTE: Read our post on Aldi Valentine’s Day food here, and you can find our post about Aldi Valentine’s Day gifts and décor here.
Just when you begin to feel you’ve gotten past all of the Christmas indulgences, stores start setting out Valentine’s Day sweets to tempt you. Aldi is no different. They are selling an assortment of name-brand Valentine’s Day chocolate such as Reese’s and Dove, but they also sell a variety of chocolates under their house brand, Choceur.
Many of us can agree that standard name-brand boxed chocolates can be a crapshoot. What’s under that chocolate shell? Is it something delicious like caramel or something strange like unidentifiable pink goo?
I set out — with help from my family — to tackle the mystery and sample the boxed Valentine’s Day chocolates from Aldi to see how they compare to traditional national brands of boxed chocolates. Good news: we liked the Aldi chocolates a lot better than many more expensive brands. And we’ve tried enough name-brand boxed chocolates over the years to know a thing or two about bad Valentine’s chocolates.
In the winter of 2021, Aldi sold three different boxes of chocolates for Valentine’s Day under its Choceur brand, including a box of European chocolates and a giant box of premium chocolates. I decided to start with a standard-sized, mid-priced box of premium chocolates.
The Choceur Premium Chocolate Assortment cost $3.99 for a 6.35-oz. box at the time of publication.
This is an Aldi Find (Special Buy), which means it’s only in stores for a short time.
This is a classic Valentine’s Day box of chocolates, packed in an iconic red heart-shaped box, that won’t break the giver’s budget.
The chocolates, unboxed.
This box contains 18 pieces of chocolate in the following flavors:
- Hazelnut nougat crunch
- Milk chocolate almond cream
- Salted caramel heart
- Milk cream with whole hazelnut
- Caramel
- Toffee crisp
- Raspberry and vanilla cream
- Caramel crisp
There’s a useful color photo guide to which chocolates are which on the back of the box. Plus, inside the box is a sheet with an illustrated guide.
This box is a product of Poland, and the chocolate is made with cocoa certified by the Rainforest Alliance, whose seal indicates the cocoa was produced using methods that promote social, economic, and environmental sustainability.
Like most chocolate assortments, these have a lengthy ingredients list, with the first few ingredients being sugar, cocoa butter, milk, chocolate, and palm oil.
If you’re watching out for allergens, these contain milk, soy, hazelnut, and wheat. They may contain traces of peanuts, other tree nuts, and egg.
Nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)
This box contains six 3-piece servings. One serving will net you 150 calories, 9 grams of total fat (12% DV), 5 grams of saturated fat (25% DV), 30 mg of sodium (1% DV), 17 grams of total carbohydrates (6% DV), 16 grams of total sugars, and 15 grams of added sugars (30% DV).
So, what do my family and I think of these chocolates?
In general, we really like them. First of all, they’re very pretty, with hearts and swirls and various colors. Second, in terms of how they taste, they range from excellent to average. We don’t think there are any absolute duds in the box, which is more than we can say for most other boxed chocolates we’ve had.
Our favorite flavors are any of the caramel chocolates, along with the milk cream with whole hazelnut.
We also like the raspberry and vanilla cream, which has a white creamy center filled with a raspberry goo or gel. It’s like the jelly-filled doughnut version of a chocolate, and several members of my family (myself included) love jelly doughnuts, so this is right up our alley.
The crisp chocolates — the hazelnut nougat crunch, toffee crisp, and caramel crisp — are not easy to distinguish from each other, but they taste good.
Finally, the milk chocolate almond cream is sort of your standard chocolate from a box. It has an almost fruity flavor, likely due to the almond flavoring, and it’s okay.
Overall, this box is a solid choice if you want to gift some chocolates to a special someone this year for Valentine’s Day. There’s not a bad chocolate in the box.
The Verdict:
The Choceur Premium Chocolate Assortment contains a nice variety of chocolates, from caramels to fruity flavors to creams. This is better than many name-brand assorted boxed chocolates we’ve had in the past. Recommended.
