Do people like cheap American chocolate better than expensive imports?

If there's one thing I've learned from writing this article, it's that packaging is everything. Leave a dish of chocolates with pretty foil wrappers and crinkly paper sleeves on your desk, and everyone walking down the hall stops in for a snack. But set out 16 kinds of plain chocolate chopped into bits on paper plates, and it's chore to eat. Or at least, some of it is a chore to eat.

Everyone "knows" that European chocolate is good and American chocolate—Hershey's, to be exact—is bad. But can average Americans really tell the difference, or is this just another example of our natural inferiority complex? Will your sweetie be right to dump you if you buy her or him cheap chocolate for Valentine's Day? To find out, I talked to some experts and set up a blind taste test, and I give you my results below.

The traditional categories of chocolate (milk, semisweet, and bittersweet) are confusing because many makers use similar terms for very different things. Try comparing Lindt's "bittersweet" chocolate (a mild, barely bitter taste) with Scharffen Berger's (extremely bitter) and you'll see what I mean. And to confuse matters even further, some makers simply label their chocolate "dark." So I lumped semisweet and bittersweet into one category and used three broad categories: milk, dark, and semisweet (includes some bittersweet). I focused exclusively on chocolate you eat, ignoring the stuff you cook with.

I conducted the taste test in two shifts with a total of 10 participants. I cut the chocolate up into small pieces on numbered paper plates and asked participants to rate the chocolate on a 10-point scale, with 1 as the worst (think Advent calendar chocolate) and 10 as their ideal chocolate. I provided water, bread, and crackers as palate cleansers, and asked them to take their time in writing scores and notes on taste. Nobody knew which chocolates they were tasting. What was most interesting was the fact that consuming a whole bar's worth of chocolate—when you have to—is tough, and getting through all the samples was tedious. I know, because I was one of the tasters. (Click here to find out more about the demographics of the tasters.)

Milk

In the kind of sweet reversal of expectation a shopping columnist always hopes for, tasters consistently rated the cheaper milk chocolates as tasting better than the expensive ones. Even better, the cheapest chocolate received the highest taste score:

Even though milk chocolate is America's chocolate of choice, the tasters were unimpressed, giving it the lowest scores of all three types, with the average coming in at 3.9. And boy, did they hate the Blanxart chocolate. Here's a sampling of their venom for it:

"Hello? Flavor? Where are you?"

"Yucky. Kind of an ashy taste."

"Tastes like cigarette ash … bad after-taste."

"Headache-inducing … American mass-produced" (more evidence of our chocolate inferiority complex, especially considering the chocolate was from Spain).