There are few things as life-affirming as baking a chocolate cake from scratch, but sometimes it’s simply not possible. Maybe your kid is sick, or you’re running late, or you forgot to pick up Dutch-process cocoa powder. That’s when a great boxed chocolate cake mix can save the day.
The first cake mixes were released nearly a century ago by P. Duff and Sons, a Pittsburgh company that patented a process for dehydrating cake batter. But it wasn’t until after World War II that premade cake mix really became popular. It was the same brands that dominate grocery store shelf space today—Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, and Duncan Hines—that gained the strongest foothold with American consumers.
Boxed cake mixes are convenient, of course: Add a couple of eggs, oil, and water, slide the batter-filled tin into the oven, and you’re done. But they can be versatile: Swap out that water for a liquid that’ll add some oomph—coffee, for example, in a chocolate cake. Or use a bright, verdant olive oil in place of the neutral oil to add a layer of complexity to any boxed cake. If you don’t have time for a fully homemade cake recipe, you can still make something unique and full of flavor. But first, you’ll need a quality cake mix.
To find the best chocolate cake mix you can buy in-store, we put 13 brands through a blind taste test. In the end our tasters selected three mixes they agreed resulted in the springiest, most chocolaty cakes.
How we picked the products
We started our sourcing for this taste test by scoping out as many familiar supermarket brands as possible. Next, we consulted existing reviews for boxed chocolate cake mix to see which brands we might have overlooked.
Boxed chocolate cake mix is available in several varieties, including devil’s food, milk chocolate, and chocolate fudge. We included any of the subcategories that feature chocolate as the central flavor, without extraneous ingredients. Not on the list: German chocolate cakes, Oreo cakes, chocolate-caramel cakes, and the like. That meant some brands were represented more than others: Duncan Hines has four contenders in our taste test, while Whole Foods 365 has just one, for example.
How we set up our blind taste test
To reduce food waste, we baked each mix into cupcakes rather than full cake rounds (easier to pawn off the leftovers to a bevy of coworkers who weren’t in attendance). The cakes were baked in the morning, following all package instructions, and we held our tasting that afternoon after letting the cupcakes cool for several hours. We left our cupcakes unfrosted so our tasters could focus solely on the cake. Tasters tried each sample one by one, sharing notes on appearance, aroma, texture, and flavor before moving to the next contender. After tasting each cupcake, they identified several standouts and retasted before agreeing on favorites.
How we evaluated
We’re not interested in a cake that simply gestures to chocolate flavor, our tasters said. They wanted a serious, deep, rich expression of chocolate in both aroma and bite. Ideally, that chocolate flavor wouldn’t be straightforwardly sweet. Instead, like real chocolate, it would have some element of complexity: a fruity note or a slight bitterness to offset some of the sweetness in the mix.
