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.
I mean, isn’t “white chocolate” 0% cocoa?
No solids, it should be made of cocoa butter. In the shit one I had they replaced all of the cocoa butter with palm oil. Tbh I don’t think they should legally be able to call it chocolate.
Funny how the milk industry fought so hard to ban the use of milk on vegetable products. Now they are all called drink. But there was no confusion to the public just a dick move.
Yet here where the intention is clear to see something which is not it, this is magically ok.
Which country did that? Cause here in the US, we still have milk everything. Oat milk, almond milk, soy milk, you name it.
Many, many places. It’s so strongly regulated here, I think they even have to call it goat drink, too! The cow lobby is bullish, I tell you.
No that does not exist. Just the plant produxta
Okay name one.
cocoa butter, sugar, milk solids. No cacao.
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.
I think we’re talking about very old brands that sell in big numbers because they’ve locked in grocery store shelf space and Halloween combo bag deals. It’s not like every sale is made after a careful taste test.
Boomers with practically no taste buds left will still buy these to hand out to trick or treaters because they remember them being good 40 years ago. Meanwhile the manufacturer can add millions in profit by shaving costs here and there, because they operate at such huge volume. Their brand is mature and their market is saturated. They can’t really grow sales anymore so all they can do to juice profits is cut costs.
I’m not justifying their way of thinking, just saying this is why they don’t behave as if every single candy must taste amazing. Their profits keep chugging without that. And if you aren’t growing profits, you’re dead. So blame capitalism for the underlying reasons for why they can’t just leave well enough alone.
The New Coke fiasco begs to differ.
The cynic in me imagines that they switch away from real chocolate, everyone will hate it, they’ll release a new product line that proclaims it uses real chocolate, but charge a premium for it, and people will buy it.
What premium am I paying for any Coke vs. other name brand soda?
I don’t understand the question.
Ah, okay, you’re putting two points together.
I think people came back to original Coke because they were looking for a specific flavor. When they had no reason to buy Coke, their options were limited - buy what they can get, or stop drinking colas. I kept on with Coke, but was happy when they changed back. As an older person now, I’d make a different choice.
As for quality vs. taste people will buy what they find acceptable for the price, with a minimum standard that is generally very individual. This has been the case for a very long time, and cocoa is pretty expensive. It isn’t surprising that some people will pay more and higher quantities of expensive ingredients lead to a more expensive product. Toss in inflation, and here we are.
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.
You’re using the future tense but this is pretty much the way it already is. No one considers hersheys good chocolate. It’s getting slightly worse and people are acting like some goddess has been kicked off her pedestal. Its more like a dead dog has just had one more fly land on it.
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.
Not eating candy is always an option for adults with an ounce of self control.
So is eating a moderate amount of higher quality and more expensive chocolate. Its okay to enjoy a treat every once in a while
NO. We must all SUFFER. It’s what The Lord intended.
I should become a baptist pastor this is fun.
Well swish swish. Even those with an ounce of self control sometimes also allow themselves an ounce of enjoyment. You should try it.
I thought we were talking about a product that had become un-enjoyable a second ago. What enjoyment can an adult get out of chocolate flavored wax that they couldn’t get better somewhere else with a product they like, rather than one they used to like before it was made bad?
If all my chocolate options are actually brown wax, I don’t actually have any chocolate options.
The comment I replied to was generalized to all candy.
I eat candy because it tastes good. If it all tastes like shit they why should I eat it?
If something turns to shit, you stop eating it and get something else I guess?
Trader Joe’s has giant Belgian chocolate bars, and far far better peanut butter cups with normal PB.
Ozempic!
That doesn’t sound like this quarter’s problem, or even next quarter’s problem. In fact, that doesn’t even sound like the quarter after that’s problem.
Stupidity and short term money.
I’m sure they tested the new recipe on a sample audience long before they put it into mass production which informed them that the recipe change would positively impact their bottom line. Big companies don’t make enormous blunders which put them out of business. The social media tech companies we all hate are still around after all the crap they did. Why? Because all of the negative changes they made to their platforms were first tested on a sample of users and the sample kept using it. After all of the recipe downgrades and shrinkflation, you still see the products on the shelves. The only time you ever see an established brand suddenly vanish is when they’re bought out by private equity or they’re made obsolete by new technology.
All good points bit missing mine: brands vanish all the time. Companies too.
It’s just that short term money is valued, thats how we run today. It’s never about long term services and products.
That’s what happened to me and Oreo’s during the switch from soy oil to trans-fat-free oils. They were NASTY during that transition.
hershey isnt real chocolate, they add a bitterent that why it taste like shit, i think its butyric acid.
Mmm, pukey
It doesn’t taste like shit, it tastes like spoiled milk
Uhhh the finest sour milk the free market can bare pls
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
That may be what it is now, but the original cause was spoil d milk. Because Hershey refused to use powdered milk, he had just bought a massive dairy farm and insisted on using fresh milk.
Accidentally? I thought he had a large batch of spoiled milk powder and was looking for a way to use it up.
Hershey doesn’t use powdered milk. Hershey himself stubbornly insisted on the recipe using fresh milk because he had ignorantly bought up a bunch of cows before getting the recipe nailed down.
And that’s why American chocolate is bad, or so the legend goes.
Source: I’m from Pennsylvania and have taken the Hershey factory tour many times since childhood.
It’s fine, it’s only sold in the US.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hersheys-chocolate-tastes-like-vomit_l_60479e5fc5b6af8f98bec0cd
Even if you are familiar with the process, I’ll leave this here for anyone interested in the why. Article is a bit apologetic to Hershey’s, but still seems to be good info.
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.
dear lordt
And then use scare tactics to convince everyone that we have to use their products for Halloween.
Hershey’s chocolate tastes like wax and vegetable oil.
you can get better chocolate at aldi and make your own peanut butter cups at home, it’s fairly easy
edit, Ive made pot peanut butter cups before, is delightful.
low dose, but, infuse the marijuana bud with coconut oil and use the coconut oil in the chocolte when you melt it. You cant put much, but it’s fun none the less
Reeses Cups are the absolute worst candy these days. They are so terrible now, and I used to love them. The peanut filling is gross.
Pretty interesting that this was something I remember being warned about 26 years ago
They are also sounding the alarm bells for bananas, arabica beans, soy beans and soy corn…
My recollection is that around the time I was being told chocolate was going extinct, they were also telling me soy bean futures were the best investment
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.
So, do we need baking community?
Chocolate is often candymaking, not baking, though.
That’s just bread. I’m talking about cakes.
Chocolate is cady but brownie is cake :)
This has basically been my mantra for the last 5 years. “Fuck off, I’ll do it myself.”
Cooking nerd here. You can kind of make your own chocolate.
You almost certainly can’t make chocolate from scratch. You could, in theory do all the steps but even in the old days it was an industrial process and it’s nearly impossible to get the quality control tight enough at home. The fermentation, roasting, and grinding steps all have to be done under very precise conditions or you won’t get good chocolate.
You could just go really old school and use the Aztec recipes but that’s not “chocolate” as most people would know it. It’s more like a spiced tea.
Home cooks can buy chocolate (it’s worth it to splurge and get nice chocolate if you’re going through this much trouble) and mix it and shape it. You can make a wide array of flavored ganaches, coat things in chocolate, fill chocolate shells with stuff, etc.
The hardest part is tempering. Chocolate is actually a crystal. The short version is that if you don’t control that crystal formation through careful temperature and movement control, your chocolate will get weird and chalky; if you get that all right it’s smooth and snappy. There are books and videos on it but you’ll need to mess up a bunch of batches before you learn it.
Baking is relatively easy, but how do you make your own chocolate? I don’t think you can properly do that at home.
It can be done, but it’s not easy.
You can, but you also don’t have to make it from scratch. Various forms of real, non-ultraprocessed-and-candified chocolate are guaranteed sitting lonely and forgotten in grocery store baking aisles around the world at this very moment. There’s also the option of finding a reputable local chocolatier, if you have one. I’ve never lived anywhere where there aren’t at least several local options, if not countless, but maybe I’m just lucky that way. Even if not, there’s always online ordering.
I’m from Austria, so plenty of options for high quality chocolate here. But they have gotten quite pricey lately.
Either way, I should lose weight (:
I’ve seen recipes, which are basically just cocoa butter and cocoa powder, and they seem pretty simple, though I’ve never tried them.
Most chocolate “making” just starts with chocolate callets. Melt them, temper it, put it in moulds, and add filling. I’ve done this, and it’s not that difficult. Of course, the quality here depends on the quality of the callets, so if you start with Hershey’s (not sure if they even make callets), it’ll still taste like vomit.
I recently made brownies from scratch, and they came out so much better than the box brownies that I usually make, that my entire family noticed, and really loved them. It wasn’t that much more work than the box, you just had to measure out the flour, sugar, and cocoa, but the difference was huge. Well worth the slight extra effort.
Did you use butter and milk or oil and water in the box mix? That’s usually the only difference. The box mix is just flour, cocoa powder, salt, etc. The quality of those ingredients doesn’t vary too much.
Butter yes, milk no.
I saw an old Good Eats episode where Alton Brown put the brownies in for about 15 minutes, took them out for 10 minutes, then put them back in the oven until they were finished. He claimed that the interruption changes the chemical reaction somehow, and makes them better. I’ve tried it in the past, and they seemed to be marginally better, but it m.not sure.
He frequently does things that make recipes 2% better for 50% more effort. Which is appreciated, but often a little silly. Sometimes though it is well worth it.
I doubt that would be significant. Real butter and real milk are the biggest difference between real rich brownies and the cheap stuff.
if you don’t like capitalism stop eating corpo food.
This.
Might be a little time consuming but very rewarding. Also, they can be a easy gift to friends and families.
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Great, that exactly the voice I wrote it in :)
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 know m&ms are Mars but those little bits of poison have also tasted like vomit for decades. I can’t even watch people choke those friggen things down. Smarties or death.
Smarties are nestlé, so it’s probably both.
Candy makerscapitalistsFTFY
Yeah it would be really nice if the media could distinguish a bit better between “actual expert at thing X that has done it for a long time and gives a shit” versus “people/corporations that started with tons on money and think they could end up with slightly more by misleading fans of X and building the infrastructure to efficiently enshittify it”
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.
We have an inflation target now, they either raise prices or shrinkflate. Its much easier to shrinkflate.
“We are proud to announce our products are completely free of any natural ingredients!”
Reminds me of CHOW, the “non-food food” marketed by Famine in Good Omens.
It’s like a full synthetic oil change, but for your gut.
…but no slavery
“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.
i get a single fair trade dark chocolate bar every week or two & let the squares melt against the roof of my mouth. lately it’s been hu cashew butter & raspberry. usually a couple of squares satisfies my cravings. occasionally i make fudgy brownies with fair trade dutch processed cocoa if i’m really fiending. a chocolatier in a yt video said “eat less chocolate so you can eat a higher quality chocolate” & i took that to heart.
We continued releasing more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for decades after learning that it was causing increasingly extreme weather
Sorry, but I really want to try the fermented seed cocoa. There are non-Nestlé versions and having an option that doesn’t exploit child slaves is always a good option.
Choviva is not very good imo. Good enough for some cookies or müsli though, products where the chocolate content is small and not high quality. And I’m someone who is generally charitable with alternatives a la mock meat, cheeses, etc. It tastes like toasty fat.
Cyanide is “natural”. Not everything “natural” is good for you. I’m all for alternatives, although as with any other thing, they need to study them to make sure they’re safe. Like aspartame, which is one of the most studied substances on earth. It’s safe. And it’s a fantastic tool to have - saying this as a diabetic, but artificial sweetners gives us the ability to make tasty foods that save calories/carbs, which is something most people can use.
So I don’t know about ChoViva in specific, but if there’s an alternative to cocoa that doesn’t rely on slave labour and isn’t harmful… I’m all for it.
By coveting.
There’s a scene from Band of Brothers, two GIs meet a French family on D-Day. One of the soldiers offers the boy, 4 or 5 years old, a chocolate bar. The boy smiles from ear to ear when he tastes it. His father says, “Thank you. He’s never had chocolate before.”
Imagine that. Imagine living in a society where chocolate is considered an exotic food. That’s how the world was, for almost all of human history. You live in Norway and you want a lemon? HA! Tough shit, you’ll never even know what lemon smells like.
But, at some point, Americans got used to having every delicacy from every corner of the world. We forgot that each nibble of chocolate is exotic. That the beans aren’t native to our country. That most people in the world can’t afford real chocolate except as a rare treat. And look at us now - just like the rest of the world.
lol GRAPESEEDS.
Lab-grown? Lab-GROWN? What fucking part of the metal tank has the growing area?
The hydroponic lab?
Shits like a century old.
Also I don’t think the term Lab Grown would really apply in this case. Unless I’m wrong I’m pretty sure the term would be lab synthesized, unless they are just using the materials to rend down into building blocks to grow cocoa artificially via some type of cellular manipulation method.
probably synthesized, sunflower/grapeseed mixture. probably just turn the seeds intoa pulp and made it into faux-colate.
There is no corner they aren’t willing to cut.
How to say you come from the States without saying you come from the States.
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’ll say it, it makes you better. (This is not biased, I just so happen to also have that same preference)
Dark chocolate is quite healthy, specifically coco is known to have healthy properties and the darker it is the less sugar.
True, but the amounts of dark chocolate I eat probably isn’t.
i usually prefer 85-100 if possible.
Bars?
Rookie numbers.
I think real dark chocolate can actually be good for you. Shame I like the crap stuff. But not this crap, this shit tastes like you’ve talked up a bit of stomach bile while you were chewing.
Absolutely, its still an acquired taste but it can have health benefits (of course if you don’t like the taste then the health benefits probably aren’t worth it).
i do the same, its either 90-100% if im lucky to find 100% thats not part of the baking aisles.
