I'd spun the roulette wheel once with this Casino, trying the French chocolate brand's dark chocolate with hints of cacao bean, sourced from Caribbean cacao.  The verdict from that bar (and a few Casino pizzas) was that retail behemoth Casino was using its sales clout to produce some decent quality home brands.       

I picked up three chocolate bars that day I was strolling through Casino's Thai-subsidiary Big C.  Two were dark bars.  My wife and step-son are anti-dark. Not as vociferously anti-dark as the white supremacists running South Africa in the 1980's and before, but close.  Milk chocolates are the name of their game, as they are of most amateur chocolate tasters.  The little leaguers seem to have an obsession with caramel as well, all the more so if the caramel is mixed with milk chocolate.  I love caramel as much as the next guy.  Whenever we go to Swensen's for a sundae, I'll go out of my way to order a sundae drenched in caramel.  But in the Chocolate Republic's sphere of influence, I've found that caramel is usually added to chocolate to cover up the taste of inferior product.  Caramel has such a tasty flavor and texture that the quality of the chocolate the caramel is packed into drifts into the background for consideration.   I remember the Marathon bars I used to eat as a kid.  They made better rulers than they did quality chocolate bars, and Mars discontinued them over 30 years ago, probably to save lives.  At the time I ate them  in the mid- and late-70's, these braided bars were treated like fine champagne.  My palate was distracted by the caramel.  I didn't get a chance to comprehend how bad the chocolate really was.

WIthin the Chocolate Republic, I sometimes come across tasty caramel bars, like Whittaker's, where great care has gone into the chocolate and the caramel. It's rare.  So when I saw this Casino Milk Chocolate Bar with Bits of Caramel, I picked it out mainly for the wife.            

This is not your standard caramel bar, the kind you bite into and strands of sinewy caramel drip from your lips and the interior of the bar.  This bar is bits of caramel. Just 16% of the bar is caramel to be exact.  The difference with just bits of caramel rather than blobs of it is that Casino's milk chocolate can't hide behind a dominant caramel consistency and flavor.  Here, the caramel is an intermittent filling like almonds or hazelnuts or raisins would be.  It enhances a milk chocolate that has to be good enough to stand on its own.      

This caramel wasn't soft and chewy.  It was hard and more like toffee, and it worked very well with the competently-made milk chocolate.  Casino easily meets the standards of any grocery store chain trying to markets its own brand of chocolates without having to recruit a cocky specialist in Belgium or Switzerland to do it.  It's a gamble that pays off in spades.