Almost no one noticed when, sometime over the last few years, the packaging on Almond Joy, Mr Goodbar and Rolo was updated to remove the words “milk chocolate.”
Experts say high cocoa prices have triggered a wave of “reformulations,” the industry term for recipe changes…
…replacing expensive cocoa butter with other fats, a swap that means their products no longer meet the US regulatory definition of milk chocolate and can no longer be called that on packaging.
Asked about reformulations in a February earnings call, Steve Voskuil, Hershey’s chief financial officer, said, “It’s a place we look at, we test, and in some parts of our portfolio, over time, we’ve made some changes,” and added that “there’s been no consumer impact whatsoever.”
Food scientists say they’re trained to tweak recipes in a manner that evades consumer detection.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
5
In the last few weeks, two well known UK chocolate biscuit bars have been in the news. They are no longer permitted to describe themselves as “chocolate”. It’s due to the reduction in the use of actual cocoa in them has brought them below the legal definition.
Now, as with a lot of stuff, Penguin and Club have both suffered from “shrinkflation” but this seem to be a nail in the coffin. Not least as Club’s long standing advert slogan has been “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our Club”.
Canada lost its Jersey Milk chocolate bar this year, our plain solid milk chocolate bar. Mondelez took over Neilson brands some time ago, and they have slowing been getting rid of all the brands that were originally Canadian. The choice of Halloween fun sizes candies is much smaller than when I was a kid. We are limited to mostly either Mondelez, Nestlé or Mars Inc chocolate bars.
We have Canadian made Dairy Milk, Aero, and Hershey, but they’re not as chocolatey as British -made Dairy Milk or Aero, or Ritter Sport milk chocolate
