Thursday, June 13, 2013

The Big Bar Line Up - Ritter Sport

Today we continue looking at the so called Big Bars in the candy aisle with a step into the interesting world of Ritter Sport.

This is a bit of a weird one. Firstly, Ritter Sport is a German, in fact it may be the most widely spread commercially available pure German chocolate. Despite their reputation alongside the Swiss and French for some of the best chocolate in the world the Germans don't export too much prepackaged chocolate, and other than Kinder (which is actually the German arm of Italian chocolatier Fererro) I believe Ritter is the German chocolate seen here in Canada most often.

The word "Ritter" mean nobility in German, and the "Sport" comes from the fact that the creator apparently wanted a bar that could fit easily into the breast pocket of a sports coat. So all of the Ritter Sports feature the same form factor, small and square. In fact they've really run with the 'square' angle in their marketing. Small is a bit of a misnomer too because despite being square Ritters are thick and on a whole s good, so rich, and so creamy that a bar is more than enough. Really I couldn't imagine eating a whole bar of Ritter at once anyhow, they are just such a delicacy.

While Ritter Sport bars are found in Canada the States and lots of other countries they are often not found precisely in the Big Bar section of the store. They are more commonly seen in their own display pop up.


This may seem excessive, and I'm sure it costs an arm and a leg to send these out to the stores, but what great marketing. You may see pop ups for other chocolates at certain seasonal times of year but Ritter Sports are in these all the time, and it makes them stand out like no other. That said, maybe because of the investment in floor space, you might not find a Ritter pop up in your local 7-11. If you can find them, you should find a lot of them, and a lot of different varieties, but sometimes finding that pop up at all can be tricky.

I've only reviewed one Ritter Sport before here on the Candy Aisle, the Ritter Sport Espresso, which now that I look for it I can't seem to find in real life again. Please check out my review of that right here. But now lets have a look at the line up for Ritter Sport, here in the Great White North.


Starting with a few simple flavors Ritter is known for rich and creamy chocolate.

And then they've got the specialty Dark Chocolate.


And the specialty Milk Chocolate.


They've got a few nut mixes too. It seems like Ritter specializes in really good basic mixes, and I think that serves them well.


They all seem like sort of simple ideas, but these next ones are unique, especially on any mass scale.


Definitely interesting stuff here. Finally here are two flavors I think might be unique to Ritter. Not that they're so revolutionary, in fact I think they're great ideas that maybe should be obvious, but I can't think of anyone else to really feature these flavors in this kind fo form factor. Like I said, its very interesting.


Although I know there are more out there. In fact the Ritter Sport website lists something like 30 different flavors available, these are all the ones I see commonly here in Canada. Let me know if you've got a favorite Ritter Sport flavor or have anything totally off the wall from them in your neck of the woods. I'm hoping to review a few more of these soon on the Candy Aisle.

Thanks for joining me, and I hope you'll stay tuned for another look at the candy aisle big bars soon.

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