3 Excellent Hot Chocolate Mixes, According to Our Taste Test

A good instant hot chocolate mix should deliver everything you want from homemade hot chocolate—deep chocolate flavor, creamy consistency—but, you know, instantly. No chopping chocolate or careful melting required. Just add hot water or milk, stir, and sip. But cocoa mixes vary wildly: Some are milky and sweet, others dark and verging on bitter, and some are closer to thick, velvety drinking chocolate than the stuff you drank at that budget ski lodge when you were 10.

To find the best hot chocolate mixes, we sampled 15 supermarket and specialty varieties, including Swiss Miss, Starbucks, Ghirardelli, Guittard, Dandelion Chocolate, Jacques Torres, and Valrhona. We prepared each according to its package directions and judged it on chocolate flavor, sweetness, and texture. Our favorites cover three distinct cravings: Starbucks Classic for quintessential hot cocoa, Guittard for a richer, more luxurious sip, and Dandelion Chocolate’s house mix for complex, splurge-worthy chocolate flavor.

The best classic hot chocolate: Starbucks

Starbucks Classic Hot Cocoa scratched the nostalgia center of our collective brains, tasting like the hot chocolate we remember drinking at ice rinks or after a snow day spent sledding.

Why it won us over: Tasters immediately recognized this as “classic cocoa,” as senior cooking editor Kelsey Jane Youngman put it. Starbucks’ instant hot chocolate mix delivered satisfying milk-chocolate flavor and silky texture, even when prepared with water—though we recommend using milk or your favorite non-dairy alternative for an even creamier cup. It wasn’t the most complex cocoa we tasted, but its balanced sweetness and familiar chocolate profile made it an easy favorite.

The upgrade: Guittard

Richer and more chocolate-forward than Starbucks’ offering, Guittard’s Grand Cacao Drinking Chocolate is the hot cocoa mix to reach for when you want something a little more indulgent.

Why it won us over: Guittard makes some of our favorite chocolate chips and the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen’s go-to cocoa powder, so we had high hopes for its hot cocoa. It delivered deep chocolate flavor and flawlessly smooth texture. While some premium contenders skewed too bitter, Guittard struck an ideal bittersweet balance with “just enough sweetness to get away with it,” according to food director Chris Morocco.

The splurge: Dandelion Chocolate

Made with single-origin chocolate, Dandelion Chocolate’s House Hot Chocolate Mix produced something closer to drinking chocolate than the hot cocoa packets we grew up with. It was fruity, intensely chocolaty, and slightly bitter, with a thick, velvety consistency.

Why it won us over: Dandelion stood apart from the first sip. While most hot chocolate mixes leaned sweet and milky, this one, as Kelsey put it, tasted like a “melted bar of dark chocolate.” Tasters picked up notes of red berries buried in the deep chocolate flavor—a reminder, per senior Test Kitchen editor Jesse Szewczyk, that cacao is indeed a fruit. Restrained sweetness allowed the intriguingly complex flavors to shine, ultimately luring tasters back for a second (and third, and fourth) sip.

At more than $2 an ounce, this isn’t the hot chocolate we’d reach for when a dozen kids come in from sledding. It’s the one to savor on a cold evening when you’re in the mood for something closer to dessert than an everyday cup of cocoa.

How we tested

We prepared each mix according to its package instructions, using hot water or milk as directed, then portioned the hot chocolate into individual tasting cups and served it warm. Tasters sampled the mixes without knowing which brands they were drinking and evaluated each for flavor and texture.

What we looked for

It sounds silly to say hot chocolate should taste chocolaty, but not all contenders met this basic criterion. We wanted rich cocoa flavor with enough sweetness to balance its natural bitterness, but not so much that sugar overwhelmed the cup.

Texture mattered too. Our favorites were creamy and silky, without the chalkiness, grittiness, or powderiness that knocked other contenders down the rankings.

Other hot chocolate mixes we tried

• Abuelita Mexican-Style Instant Hot Chocolate Mix: Its distinctive cinnamon flavor was pleasant, but set it too far apart from the unspiced mixes our tasters preferred.
• Cadbury Hot Chocolate: An overpowering sweetness muddied any true chocolate flavor.
• Ghirardelli Classic Hot Cocoa Mix: Ghirardelli’s Hot Cocoa Mix with Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips took the top spot in 2022. Tasters were just as impressed by this version’s creamy texture, but ultimately found it too sweet.
• Great Value Milk Chocolate Flavor Hot Cocoa Mix: An off-putting waxy aroma and tart flavor kept this one out of the running.
• Jacques Torres Classic Hot Chocolate: Rich texture, but a caramelized vanilla flavor distracted from the chocolate.
• Lake Champlain Chocolates Traditional Organic Hot Chocolate: Too milky, without enough of a chocolate backbone.
• Nestlé Rich Milk Chocolate Flavor Hot Cocoa Mix: An aggressive vanilla flavor and cloying sweetness took this one out of the running.
• Raaka Double Dark Hot Chocolate: Deep chocolate flavor, but its pronounced bitterness and acidity kept it out of the top.
• Sillycow Farms Hot Chocolate: Overly sweet and too mild in flavor for our tasters’ palates.
• Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate Flavor Hot Cocoa Mix: Our tasters detected an unpleasant saltiness.
• Swiss Miss Rich Chocolate Flavor Hot Cocoa Mix: Unbalanced sweetness and not enough chocolate flavor.
• Trader Joe’s Organic Hot Cocoa Mix: This one was far too sugary, with an unnaturally thick texture tasters compared to canned soup.
• Valrhona Dark Hot Chocolate Mix: Pleasantly chocolaty, but too sweet.
• Vosges La Parisienne Drinking Chocolate: Rich chocolate taste, but with an overt milky sweetness that put it out of balance.
• Whole Foods Organic Hot Cocoa Rich Chocolate Flavor Mix: This one was mellow and milky, but overall not quite chocolaty enough and a touch too sweet for us.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in 2022. For this update, we conducted a new taste test of 15 products. The tasting notes for Great Value, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods are from our original test; we evaluated the remaining products in 2026.