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I don't understand how they cant see that once we leave we leave. If you bite into that and hate it; its a cycle broken and we we unlikely to trust the product ever again.
It's what happened with Bassets Winegums. Used to be my absolute favourite candy. Wife came back from the UK with a box,I opened it and the taste was... Different. Googled - turns out they changed the recipe after being purchased by some large conglomerate. I haven't had one of their candies since 13 years ago. Fucking idiots.
Well if they all do it, who are ya gonna run to?
i will have to give it up. it will be easier if its crap anyway. Learning to pay for what you actually want vrs you think you want are two different things.
The thing is, they won't ALL do it. The big names will. Real chocolate will become more of a luxury thing you have less often (which, to be fair is probably a good thing) and the established brands might survive on some blind brand loyalty, or die out.
Not eating candy is always an option for adults with an ounce of self control.
There are plenty of companies still selling actual chocolate, and since it's chocolate and not chocolate-flavoured sweets I think it'll just become smaller and/or more expensive. Which is fine.
I didn't know Hershey's used Cocoa, I thought the main ingredient was vomit.
I’m assuming you of course are aware, but that is a tasting note. As in hersheys will specifically call out that tasting note as intentional if you do a tasting tour. It explained why I only ever liked their special dark and hates their regular bar.
It's a tasting note, because the original Hershey's milk chocolate chemist accidentally spoiled the milk as part of his process.
It took a decade or two to figure out what was wrong, but by then the American public was used to vomit tasting milk chocolate.
No. It's part of their process because it makes it more shelf-stable. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231221-why-british-chocolate-tastes-the-way-it-does
It's fine, it's only sold in the US.
Guys (and gals), there's simple solution to all that: learn to bake.
We are a community of makers. We write our apps ourselves, we host our shit by ourselves, we stream our music and our movies by ourselves. So what should we do when bad corporations are taking away our snacks? Make them yourself!
Recipes are free and open. The tools are not expensive (not much RAM in the oven). There's nothing stopping us.
So, do we need baking community?
Edit: So... !baking@lemmy.curiana.net ? It's my self hosted server. Will that work?
Yes. Host recipes. Get productive.
This has basically been my mantra for the last 5 years. "Fuck off, I'll do it myself."
So, do we need baking community?
Chocolate is often candymaking, not baking, though.
"We are proud to announce our products are completely free of any natural ingredients!"
Reminds me of CHOW, the "food-free food" marketed by Famine in Good Omens.
This has been that way for a while now. Reeses and Hershey's suck. They use a PINCH of cocoa powder and their chocolate tastes and feels like wax. The peanut butter filling is basically peanut flavored sawdust. They spend crazy amounts of money reduce ingredient costs while still maintaining a somewhat edible product. They end up with "chocolate favored wax/oil and sugar". Boycott them. You can get way better chocolate at Aldi.
I was getting some melting wafers the other day and grabbed a bag of Ghirardelli, which has been pretty reliable in the past. I didn't catch that they were "chocolate flavored" wafers until I was at checkout. Chocolate was the 8th ingredient.
I took two bites and had to spit it out
That's how I reacted the first time I tasted Hershey's chocolate.
Inb4: butyric acid
A somehow necessary ingredient in Hershey's which lingers unpleasantly on the palate, otherwise known as a stomach acid which imbues your vomit with the unmistakeable flavor of vomit
^Whyyyyyyyyy^
Actually this goes back to the early days of Hershey's. As part of their drive to produce affordable chocolate, their main formulation was developed around slightly spoiled milk, which has an acidic taste. That's why all Hershey's chocolate since the beginning of time has had that 'vomit flavor'. Obviously they're not allowed to use spoiled milk anymore, but they wanted to taste the same as it always has. So they add the acid as an ingredient to replicate the same flavor.
I recently had something sold as chocolate that contained 0% cocoa, its just a chunk of palm oil. First time I have ever had chocolate so bad I threw it in the bin. I can also taste it in Cadburys now, or they have increased their palm oil amount since I had eaten it previously.
I will be checking ingredient lists more often when buying chocolate now. If palm oil is the main ingredient it can fuck off.
“One German brand, the Nestlé-owned Choco Crossies, recently announced it was eliminating cocoa altogether from its new Snack Vibes line, replacing it with ChoViva, a lab-grown chocolate alternative made from fermented sunflower and grape seeds.”
How the fudge did we end up in this dystopian nightmare? ಥ_ಥ
Child slavery is frowned upon just enough that they have eliminated real cocoa. People won’t pay for non-slave rates, so they have to go with synthetic product.
We continued releasing more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for decades after learning that it was causing increasingly extreme weather
Club, one of my childhood favourites with the advert song of "If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club" -- no longer has enough cocoa to be legally called chocolate.
Madness.
I only eat the opposite type of chocolate, that being chocolate so dark its 90-97% coco content. I want my chocolate so natural, earthy, and bitter that it tastes similar to chocolate (that's just my preference not that it makes me any better or worse than anyone else).
... I just buy bags of ghiradelli dark chocolate baking chips, and eat a handful, when I feel like snacking on chocolate.
They have 72% cacao chips, but that is bit too rich for my taste and my wallet, 60% seems to hit the spot.
Much cheaper per weight than actual ghiradelli chocolate squares or whatever.
And you can just toss a few into some fresh hot coffee, stir for a minute, kablamo choco-coffee.
Anyway, yeah, most US 'chocolate' is disgusting.
most US ‘chocolate’ is disgusting.
Most by sheer volume because four companies make damn near every candy bar in the grocery store? Sure. Most by percent of discrete chocolatiers? Nah. There's tons of good chocolate in the US, it's just priced as the luxury good it should be (turns out slavery is great for keeping prices down)
There is no corner they aren't willing to cut.
It's fascinating how hard some sectors are fighting to forbid replacement meats or milks to call themselves steak or milk. But those products barely resembling the original name are completely allowed to call themselves chocolate or fruit juice (based on some concentrate and some other stuff).
Well obviously it sucks that the fake cocoa is disgusting, but I have to say I kinda am for the effort of trying to create an alternative, given how the cocoa producers are notorious for exploiting child labor and how terrible it is for the environment
hershey isnt real chocolate, they add a bitterent that why it taste like shit, i think its butyric acid.
Another way of reminding us there is enshittification.
Nearly no one touches the chocolates at most supermarkets I went to. Far cry from when 40 years ago, workers from overseas would include chocolate bars in care packages.
That real cocoa are mostly from developing countries, not all are politically stable.
EU has laws stating how much raw cocoa a product that calls itself chocolate must have.
US has none of that
The US, UK and EU all have government regulations about how much – or how little – cocoa an item can contain and still be considered “chocolate”, but those regulations are much stricter in Europe. In the UK, for instance, after Pladis reduced the amount of cocoa bean-derived ingredients in its McVitie’s Penguin and Club bars to below 20%, both treats were officially demoted from “chocolate” to “chocolate flavour”. In the US, the threshold is 15%, and low-cocoa items like the Unwrapped Mini Hearts can still be described as “chocolate candy”.
From the article, this is where the other answer probably got they link.
Hey I started a new community: Enshitification.
I posted this Reese's article the other day.
It's for articles like this but also personal experiences, like things you noticed going to shit.
So if you want to rant a bit about a product quality decrease, feel free to post about it there.
That's how I've felt about soft drinks in the UK since they pulled the sugar tax, now every drink just tastes of sweeteners. I'm guessing most people can't taste them or something but I can't stand them.