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
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
7
Two more well known British chocolate biscuits can no longer be called “chocolate” due to the reduction in the use of actual cocoa. Nestle’s Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband are now referred to as having a “chocolate flavour” coating.
Just about every chocolatier is using some kind of filling to off-set high cocoa prices. Tcho chocolate use to be exceptional imo but was bought by the Pocky company of Japan and not only did they go to filler (crème or nougat) they also went all plant based. Meh…
Their Mokaccino bar had milk in it, 44% cacao. After the take over I tried a few bars, then stopped buying their products. They also started putting filler in, nougat and other stuff, so they were no longer solid chocolate. What made Tcho famous was an excellent chocolate bar and non-exploitive sourcing. Their stuff went way downhill imo.
I totally agree. I adored that Mokaccino bar, and couldn’t fathom why they pivoted to “plant-based”. They had some other good dark chocolate flavors that also went by the wayside.
I hadn’t realized that Pocky had bought them.
Tcho chocolate really was all that and the Mokaccino bar was the best of the bunch imo. I didn’t realize Pocky bought Tcho until a year ago when I looked it up because I found a collection of 300+ of the Mokaccino paper wrappers stashed. I really like them and ate a square or two a day for a long time. Oh well…bummer is all I can say.
