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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

What will they replace the reduced mass with, to bulk up the product so it doesn't appear smaller?

My guess is it sure as hell won't be actual cocoa :/ [1]

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9ihtAG...

My wife's standard approach to any cake or confectionary recipe is to immediately half the listed quantity of sugar. Apparently this is common amongst pastry-chefs in catering and doesn't appear to affect the final result other than being a bit paler after cooking.

We even made half-sugar doughnuts recently which were still delicious ( no topping or filling needed ).

So I reckon Nestle will just produce a slightly less bulky confectionery, for the same price of course.

Me and my girlfriend (we both really, really like cooking) do that with a lot of recipes that involve sugar. It does affect the texture, but I think it often improves the taste.

There are things that ought to be sugary (like thick syrups used for preserving), but most pastries, jams, jellies and deserts in general need surprisingly less sugar than recent cookbooks would imply. Adding just enough sugar to take the edge off of bitterness or sourness ends up being more rewarding than cramming everything full of sugar to the point where all you feel is something odd next to the sweetness.

There are safety concerns when changing any recipe that will be preserved. The sugar in jams and jellies also acts as a preservative after they are opened.

Curious how sugar is a preservative? I would have thought it was food for bacteria.

I believe sugar is a preservative because it's hygroscopic. http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/how-does-sugar-act-preservati...

Osmotic effect on cell walls. Does not matter for chocolate or already dry pastries.

Honey is an antibacterial and it actually promotes healing.

>"The manuka, jelly bush and pasture honeys are capable of stimulating the monocytes, the precursors of macrophages, to secrete TNF-α..."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3609166/

I'm not the roots and berries type but honey seems to be an amazing compound for medicinal purposes.

Honey is pretty much nothing but sugar yet absolutely no bacteria can grow in it - there's basically a point where there's too much of it.

Honey also contains a small amount of hydrogen peroxide.

Like salt, it takes up all the water, which bacteria needs.

It's both. The dosage makes the poison.

This, among other factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_activity

After opening ought not be an issue because presumably refrigeration is used and the product is consumed before spoilage occurs.

If I understand correctly high sugar contect uncreases the shelf life. Though with in-container pasteurisation and modern preservatives I'm not sure high sugar content is necessary.

We too almost always reduce the sugar in recipes, and also find it usually improves flavor. Though the article says Nestle has made a "scientific breakthrough" so that you get the same level of sweetness with less sugar--so their products may remain overly-sweep goop.

Probably healthier at least, unless their re-engineered sugar has weird side effects like Olestra does. I'll take high sugar over "anal leakage" any day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects

I really dislike that they stopped making products with olestra. Not everyone got anal leakage.

I'm guessing that the people who did will have a different opinion to you.

Labeling is an option.

True, but I don't think I'd eat a chocolate bar with that warning on the label.

Maybe it was decided that other consumers would probably make the same decision?

That's probably okay; the few who really want non-nutritive oils could still buy them. But the volume might be low enough to force them off supermarket shelves and into specialty stores.

You can preserve in a very light syrup. For example they sell imported cherries and sour cherries in ethnic stores which have very little sugar in the syrup and they taste great!

100% agree, a great example of this would be with chocolate chip cookies. If you halve the brown sugar, white sugar, and reduce the chocolate chips by 75%, you end up with a much better tasting cookie. I can't go back to eating full sugar cookies, they're just too sweet.

I have a Taiwanese friend who says that she always halves the amount of sugar in any western recipe she makes so that it's palatable, since she hasn't grown up eating the over-sweetened garbage food that a lot of Western kids grew up with.

Anyone making food from 'recipes' in the West is likely not eating 'garbage'.

Though we do eat 'too much sugar' - the 'garbage' I suggest is really over-processed, too much hydrogenated oil etc. etc..

Anyone that made their diet out of things 'they cooked themselves' could very well use the recipes as they are and do pretty well. Most dinner dishes do not even call for sugar. Mostly only cakes and what-not. Maybe muffins are a culprit? :)

The entire conversation here is about cakes and pastry. No sensible 'Western' recipe tells you add spoons of sugar to a steak or a mushroom soup.

Have you not tried milk steak with raw jelly beans?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZfCyTpAlg8

I wish Americans would stop assuming their issues are universal to the West. Excessive sugar in recipes is a specifically American problem. I grew up in Europe, and the difference is huge.

I'm in Europe and my Chinese friends thinks a lot of stuff here is too sweet.

Same in Australia.

Europe is a big place. Ever been to a Monoprix in France? It's not exactly unprocessed wilderness in there.

Thanks! I was wondering the whole thread whats going on. I dislike american food for exact that reason (and over use of fats). Not because i think its unhealthy but because growing up in central europe i am simply not used t these fatty suggary treads.

Icelander here. We generally do this for American recipes, European recipes are usually not as sweet.

On the other hand when I was in Japan I found that all their takes on 'western' baking was ridiculously sweet. As in it tasted like they'd used twice the sugar they where supposed to.

Also sugar, like salt and chili are all ingredients where you can adjust how much you need if you don't do it too often.

I.e. if you don't eat a lot of sugar it doesn't take a lot of sugar for you to feel satisfied by the sweetness, and vice versa if you eat a lot you need more and more (which is a huge problem with sugar in alot of food today)

Same thing goes with salt and chili.

And drugs

And Factorio for that matter

Nah, if you don't watch out in the early to middle stages, things can quickly get out of hand...

I remove 75% of the sugar from cookies. It's crazy how little you notice the reduced sugar.

I think it's also one of those things where the less sugar you eat the more pronounced it tasted. Anecdotally, everything in Champaign IL tastes way sweeter after vacationing back home in Palo Alto where we rarely consume corn syrup or excess sweeteners

After having drastically reduced my sugar intake, I can't even stomach most sodas. It's startling how big of a difference it can make.

I'm the same, I can't even touch soda, it's way too sweet.

Orange juice tastes like sickly sweet syrup to me nowadays as well.

Sugar can change the texture greatly of cakes especially. I do the same thing that you do, but it does have an impact on the mouth feel.

When I bake at home I do the same thing. I'm still a bit hit or miss with regard to having things come out with the same texture/feel (how they rise or not, etc.) My basic question is how to compensate for the proportions new proportions.

But overall, the taste is much more palatable because there is much less sugar-shock.

My wife used to work in the hottest pastrie place in our city. The stuff there was totally amazing. It tasted great but not too sweet and it even felt so "light" that you'd always thing "why not have a second, third or fourth piece?"

When she quit she stole the recipes so that we could make this awesome stuff at home. Besides some really cool secret ingredients the only difference between home recipes and "best cake in town" was that the used AT LEAST twice the amount of sugar, eggs and cream than I've ever seen in any recipe.

Edit: As others mentioned. There seems to be a huge difference between Europe and USA. So these are European recipes. ;)

I do this for hot chocolate: double the cocoa powder and half the sugar from what it says on the box. Whisk with whole milk, and enjoy an incredibly rich chocolate flavor.

Putting extra sugar in hot chocolate. That one is actually new to me.

There's a difference between 'instant hot chocolate' powder (which is sweetened), and 'cocoa powder' (typically unsweetened, and quite bitter unless sugar is added).

Ok i would not call that hot chocolate, therefore the confusion. (Freely translated that would be simply called cocoa drink)

I tend to do this with a lot of cocktail books. Dale Degroff, for example, is a great writer but man does he like 'em sweet.

Would this work for cheesecake? I love the texture but hate the excessive sweetness. Maybe this would be a solution.

Yeah, just google for some of the high protein recipes.

I regularly do this with the amount of butter that Kraft thinks mac and cheese requires, often by at least 25%…

In general, I'd recommend against cutting the butter; not only is it delicious, but it also provides a nice dose of cholesterol - gotta keep those androgens high[1]. I'd argue that butter is the only healthy component of mac and cheese, so most people (excepting those with particular dietary needs) might as well keep it in and enjoy increased muscle mass[2] and a leaner body composition[3].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Biosynthesis

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen#Muscle_mass

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen#Inhibition_of_fat_dep...

The body produces cholesterol. I've never heard of someone being diagnosed with low cholesterol. Usually it's a good thing.

You're conflating dietary and blood cholesterol, which are completely different things. Eating lots of cholesterol does not give you high blood cholesterol.

I use 25% more butter plus cream instead of milk + fine shredded cheese, heat just enough to melt the butter and beat up with a whisk before mixing up with the noodles.

I agree. I make 3 boxes at once. The box calls for 1.5 sticks of butter in that case, but I only use 1, and it comes out great.

Had to Google 'sticks of butter', crazy Americans ;)

I also don't understand what Kraft is doing you telling you how to make macaroni cheese... What's in a 'Kraft mac and cheese' box that it still requires making, and yet is also some kind of recipe kit?

It's hardly a complex recipe from 'scratch' (eg http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/8834/bestever-macaroni-ch...).

> Had to Google 'sticks of butter', crazy Americans ;)

Where are you from? sticks of butter are a commonly understood quantity in Australia. Usually that's a safe bet that in other commonwealth countries it's the same.

I'm in Australia and I don't think I've ever heard of it (except maybe glossing over American recipes online). I've always measured butter in grams. The packaging often has markers so you can roughly estimate to the nearest 50g but that is it as far as I know. If anything I might have assumed it was something approximating these 50g slices.

Not so common in Canada either, it's usually measured in grams.

In the UK butter is sold in 0.25 or 0.5 kg blocks, not sticks. Recipes call for butter by weight rather than volume (unless its tablespoon sized).

    > Where are you from?

UK. As sibling commenters say, never seen a recipe asking for a stick, though it often comes with 50g divisions printed on the wrapping.

The box contains dry pasta and dry cheese flavoring. You have to add milk and butter.

I just don't understand the value in that... Swap the "dry cheese flavouring" for a bit of cornflour (or plain) and real cheese, and you have better fresher macaroni cheese with no difficulty increase; probably cheaper too.

You're not wrong, but the idea is that it has a longer shelf life, and perhaps more consistency in flavor.

Many American staples are throwbacks to the depression era, where buying a flat of Campbell's soup was a safer bet than buying a bunch of tomatoes and cream. Since then, marketers have capitalized on that sense of consistency, as well as feelings of nostalgia, to ingrain that sort of food into the American psyche.

'Better' is debatable. If you make it well, it can be quite good. Add extra milk, butter, (and salt if needed). Strain and add these before the noodles are soft, and keep it on the stove until it reduces and softens. It's a completely different experience.

Most people seem to mix that crap in cold and end up with dry, pasty mush.

I don't think the amount of butter matters at all here... You're still eating Kraft mac n' cheese, which is 100% processed... You'd be better off just eating the stick of butter on its own.

What if the recipe doubled the required amount of sugar in anticipation of people cutting the amount they add?

It's more likely that a greater amount of people use the recipe as-is, instead of halving. My guess is the recipes aren't playing reverse-psychology with cooks.

Back in 2008 Hershey's had to stop using the term milk chocolate it had to use "chocolate candy" because they started using cheaper ingredients. I guess they'll change again to this weird sugar to save on the formerly cheap ingredients.

http://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-form...

I used to like Lindt and was disappointed to see they use palm oil in their chocolate instead of cocoa butter. Even worse is palm oil plantations are made by cutting down forests and displacing endangered animal species.

Cocoa butter gives a distinct mouthfeel because it has a sharply-defined melting point. If you want that mouthfeel, you need cocoa butter.

Lindt might not want that mouthfeel. That is a legit choice, not just to be cheap.

Other legit choices include suet, ghee, lard, and even corn oil. It all depends on the mouthfeel you want. Skipping the oil/fat entirely is also an option; wilder choices for holding candy together include: pectin, agar, egg white...

Heh, kinda like kraft singles being so named because they are no longer allowed to call themselves cheese.

My grandmother, who grew up during the depression, occasionally complained about the decline in the quality of sweets and chocolates. I used to think she was exaggerating a bit, but seeing the decline in quality in my time, going from bad to worse, it's easy to see what she was talking about.

I also recall seeing that someone had placed a large bet on cocoa futures a while back, and I turned up this article to that effect. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocolat...

Anyways, I just wanted to say that it has been a shame to see large companies move away from making proper chocolate bars just to maintain their bottom line, and I can only expect that this latest maneuver is in the same spirit.

Lind is like the cheap, mass produced and not so tasty variant of swiss chocolate anyway. Still exactly what most tourists are buying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So what's the good kind?

There is a formula to calculate the quality of chocolate. I tried to find it but I wasn't able to find the one I saw a few month ago.

This isn't what I saw before but it's not bad http://expertenough.com/973/chocolate

Depending on where you are it is likely you cant get it or only in specialized shops :/ But a few wider spread brands to look for:

* Camille Bloch

* Munz

* Cailler

And if you ever are in Switzerland make sure to stop by a Läderach

I live in Germany so there's a good selection of chocolate around* :) I'll keep an eye out for these!

* coincidentally, just a few minutes walk from the Rausch factory, where we usually buy our chocolates.

Yeah germany should work :) Really each one really worth it, i am from austria originally and i cant eat anything than swiss chocolate anymore after a few years there.

But given Rausch is absolutely awesome too!

A 40% reduction of an ingredient doesn't mean that somehow there's a void in anyone's product (they could reduce the product size also, but that's a separate matter). It just means that the other ingredients together will represent a higher proportion of the final product in relation to the reduced ingredient.

Think of it this way: 1% milk has some of the milk fat removed/reduced, but that doesn't mean any other ingredient has to replace what is taken out (again, some may choose to add other things, but that's a separate choice), and your milk carton doesn't have to get any smaller. It just means your same milk carton has a higher percentage of the other components of milk.

To be clear, the article states: "this can be done without affecting the taste... Its scientists altered the structure of sugar so that it dissolves more quickly. This fools the taste buds, with the effect of raising the sweetness."

The way I read that, it seems to support the idea that nothing else has to replace the reduced sugar. But practically speaking, yes - if the other ingredients are costlier than the reduced sugar (as a higher percentage of the final product), then there's a good chance some other fillers could be added to maintain product weight and size.

Sugar, in addition to being a sweetener, is also (like salt) a flavor enhancer, bringing out flavor of other ingredients. I suspect that boosting sweetness this way will not similar boost the flavor enhancing properties of sugar to the same extent (I'm not sure of the chemical basis of the effect, but my intuition would be that this would actually reduce it.) So it shold impact the taste of the final product, although maybe not in a way that would be noticeable in most mass-market confections where the only taste that really comes through is overwhelming sweetness, with the rest of the distinctions being more textural than taste.

OTOH, sugar (including the particular form as well as the amount) has a pretty significant effect on texture, too, so I'may skeptical about that being unaffected, as well.

If I'm not mistaken, 1% in milk refers to the butter fat content, but if a chocolate is 60% sugar, isn't that by weight? Like if a bar is 100 grams, 60 grams is sugar? If that is how it works, you'll notice the missing sugar, I think.

If they're claiming a 40% reduction in sugar (by weight or by volume - the same principle applies) without affecting taste, then no, apparently you wouldn't notice the missing sugar. They're saying that an altered structure of the sugar itself makes it taste sweeter, so less sugar ends up tasting the same[1].

I am skeptical that it wouldn't affect other desirable properties of the chocolate, but I guess only time will tell whether or not their claim is actually true.

[1] There have been other similar breakthroughs in altering the structure of ingredients to allow for reductions without significantly affecting taste/texture. One notable example is low-temperature extrusion ("slow churned") ice cream.

You may not notice the taste difference, but what I think other posters are saying is that the change in mass will be noticeable?

Let's say that we've got a 100 gram candy bar, and 60 grams of that candy bar is sugar. Now, reduce the amount sugar in the candy bar by 40%, bringing it down to 36 grams of sugar. Wouldn't the 24 gram loss of sugar mean a 24 gram loss of mass in the candy bar? And wouldn't that decrease in mass of candy bar be noticeable?

> Wouldn't the 24 gram loss of sugar mean a 24 gram loss of mass in the candy bar?

No. That's what I'm trying to explain. Let's assume they're going to make the candy bar the same size regardless of ingredients. If sugar represents a smaller portion of those ingredients, it just means there will be more of the other ingredients relative to the sugar. You're really just adjusting a ratio of sugar to other ingredients.

Don't think of it in terms of a candy bar; instead, think of a giant vat filled with the melted chocolate that will eventually be turned into candy bars. By not adding as much of one ingredient, you're just raising the proportion of other ingredients to the total weight. Those other ingredients may be heavier or lighter than the absent ingredient, but it most likely won't just be air replacing it (they could add more air, but that's probably not necessary).

Even if the final product does end up being a bit lighter, I bet most people wouldn't care (and more people would appreciate the lower sugar content).

... and you're not thinking of it like a global conglomerate board member "we've cut weights as much as we can; but we think that we can pack in some filler material or cut weight further if we sell it as 'sugar reduction' - personally I'm going to use the money to buy a second floating palace, my other one doesn't match my third wife's new tiara".

Or, they could sell the product and let people choose how much to eat for themselves? If they want to do something moralistic they could quit promoting baby formula to nursing mothers, or stop buying chocolate from places that use child slaves, or go Fairtrade on cocoa and sugar.

Except that most people have repeatedly shown they're not capable of making sensible choices. Although that's possibly a secondary/tertiary effect, seeing as how it's so hugely variable over different regions of the world

Of course, as it would be a lot smaller. Or have air bubbles inside.

Chocolate is made of fat and sugar. If you put in less sugar, you put in more fat for the same amount of chocolate bar. It's not rocket science.

    > I am skeptical that it wouldn't affect other desirable properties of the chocolate,

Nestlé has a shortage of desirable properties in its chocolate anyway, so I wouldn't worry too much ;)

Air, the cheapest ingredient in food manufacturing.

Make the wafer biscuits in a Kit Kat less dense. Add more bubbles to the Aero. Change the shape of bars so that they appear bigger. Add puffed rice or pieces of biscuit to pad out solid chocolate. It's part of the standard marketing repertoire.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2421568/Revolt-Cadbu... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37904703 https://www.marketingweek.com/2015/02/12/mondelez-to-continu...

Of course, cocoa would affect the taste, a lot of people don't like dark chocolate. They're talking about another sugar that would dissolve faster in the mouth. Should be interesting at least.

Most chocolate isn't anywhere near what you would consider to be dark chocolate. Hershey's Special Dark chocolate bars are something like 45% cocoa solids where as real dark chocolate is usually north of 70%.

To say that a lot of people don't like dark chocolate is very open to interpretation and I wouldn't at all be surprised if candy makers relied on that fact to support their dilution of products.

Manufactures have been altering their chocolate formulas for decades to reduce costs. Hershey once removed cocoa butter from a number of products, replacing it with oils, which under governing laws required that they re-brand the products from "milk chocolate" to "chocolate candy".

Companies even have different formulations base on the country and their general preferences. Nutella sold in the USA is very different in taste and texture from Nutella sold in Italy. Candy sold in the UK cannot have artificial anything so all products there are very different from the USA as well.

A lot of the oils used to replace cocoa butter and milk fats have a putrid bile like flavor and so manufacturers bump up the sugar content to compensate which radically changes the flavor profile. These changes have been introduced to markets gradually over time so the market grows accustom to the changes. That's why you hear about people from Europe describing US chocolate as rancid.

*typo

Dark chocolate is pretty in fashion, at least in Europe and in Switzerland generally. There are hole series of products that range from 70% to 99%. Its insane.

http://nd.ukwebdev.com/images/foodreviews/chocolate-lindt-ex...

What is "insane" about quality chocolate? Below 60% cocoa chocolate has either too much sugar for normal tastes or funny ingredients, 60 or 70% cocoa dark chocolate is sweet, 85% cocoa dark chocolate is mainstream, 99 or 100% is really bitter, covering a range of different tastes.

The important chocolate quality axes are choice of cocoa varieties and quality of processing; the industrial-tasting 99% Lindt tablets in the photo have nothing in common with their Amedei or Bonnat counterparts.

I think they were using the word "insane" as an intensifier.

I agree with you, though- really good dark chocolate is the way to go. I work near Theo Chocolate in Seattle and the smell is just... unbelievably wonderful, especially in the mornings.

It's been in vogue in the USA for a while too but I think the market is still pretty small compared to candies like M&Ms.

True enough, but most milk chocolate products would have to add a lot of cocoa before they were considered dark chocolate. Just 20% is fairly typical here in the UK, which results in something far too sweet and barely recognisable as chocolate.

But I'm one of those freaks that actually likes dark chocolate up to 85%.

> But I'm one of those freaks that actually likes dark chocolate up to 85%.

85% seems fairly commonly OK, I've rarely found other people who like 95+, let alone my best friend the 99% (http://www.chocolate.lindt.com/shop/excellence-cocoa-99-1).

I'll eat pretty much any dark chocolate. The best place to find inexpensive, yet good, dark chocolate in the United States is ALDI. Another great thing about their dark chocolate is that it doesn't contain any dairy. One of my friends was on an extremely limited diet for a while doctors tried to figure out what was causing a mysterious allergic reaction. That meant no dairy. She missed chocolate so much she nearly cried when I gave her the first chocolate she could eat in several months.

Trader Joes (run by the other half of ALDI) also has the good chocolate. :)

> The best place to find inexpensive, yet good, dark chocolate in the United States is ALDI. Another great thing about their dark chocolate is that it doesn't contain any dairy.

Yep, they're selling the same thing in Germany, it's great. Super cheap and vegan, contains lots of cocoa butter instead of milk.

The 99% lindt is one of my favourite chocolates. The whole process of enjoying dark chocolate is different than regular milk chocolate. I noticed that people who like milk chocolate usually consume large quantities. On the other hand dark chocolate lovers eat chocolate slowly allowing it to melt in the mouth.

Funnily enough this so-called "Choccolate Meditation" is the first meditation in the book on mindfulness for meditation, it's a fun place to start. Anecdotally I've never met a hectic stressed person who liked nearly-black bitter dark choccolate :)

(ISBN-13: 978-0749953089) http://amzn.eu/8JHl1tw

Meet me then. I switched over from brown to as dark as possible during me keto era four years ago and it stuck.

But I'm not good with stress. Could be the hyperactive twin toddlers driving me crazy of course!

The nice thing is good dark chocolate basically doesn't spoil. You don't even need to refrigerate it or anything.

> On the other hand dark chocolate lovers eat chocolate slowly allowing it to melt in the mouth.

In fairness there's no other way to enjoy really dark chocolate, masticating a piece (let alone multiple) yields no taste and a completely dry and powdery mouth, it's not enjoyable.

I've run across 'Dark' chocolate in Ireland that's 40% cocoa solids, and more than that sugar. Highly disappointed.

(I'm more of a 72% dark chocolate person. )

I used to hate dark chocolate.

I've been on keto (less than 20g of sugar a day) for a few months, and can now appreciate chocolate with 95%+ cocoa. It's crazy how much frequent sugar consumption affects your taste buds.

take a walk into pure darkness sometime, good luck...bitter is not the word! https://www.montezumas.co.uk/bars-c1/100-cocoa-chocolate-bar...

Also, (unsweetened) cacao nibs: http://navitasnaturals.com/product/439/Cacao-Nibs.html

My bet: Soy Lecithin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lecithin

Chocolate already contains soy lecithin as an emulsifying agent. It's usually a very small amount of the total, so I'm not sure swapping out 40% of the sugar content (i.e., a much more significant amount of the total) with it would really work.

Sounds better than sugar! I wonder if they consider using isomalt.

Switching to isomalt will drop ~50% in the caloric content, but change mouth feel and water retention a lot. A different confection will be the result.

Yep. Adding another lower/zero-calorific sugar but with a positive heat of dissolution (to counter the negative one of isomalt) can really help here.

Similarly, you can choose sugar pairs to promote or suppress crystallisation, as the recipe style requires. This is done by selecting sugars with similar or dissimilar molecular geometry and charge distribution.

What books/websites/blogs/courses/degrees would one pursue to learn more about food chemistry on a molecular level like this?

Like isomalt + erythritol ?

Why not erythritol? Isomalt can cause some pretty severe gut issues (to which I can personally attest, unfortunately!). It's also still quite calorific (that is, it is metabolised) - erythritol isn't. I can eat it in high quantities to seemingly zero consequence. It's also got an entertaining mouthfeel, where it cools the mouth; so does isomalt, incidentally, but it's not nearly as noticeable.

I have done quite a bit of cooking with erythritol, simply swapping sugar out for it, and it usually works great. Erythritol is only about 70% as sweet, so it can sometimes be necessary to adjust for that, but really, most things are already overly sugary, so it's usually unnecessary.

They've gotten away with shrinking products for years. When cost increase they make the product cheaper, aka smaller, instead of increasing prices. That's why the giant sized candy bar at the checkout line seems like a normal size from 10 years ago. I don't see how this will be much different.

Uhm, nothing? Sugar dissolved in solution takes hardly any additional volume. It depends on the exact chemistry involved, but probably what you end up with is the same volume product with "healthier"-looking nutrition facts and significantly less mass.

Who cares, you can get proper 100% chocolate (organic, fair trade, blah...) easily from Zotter, if you want it. It doesn't really matter what Nestle comes up with next, people who eat that stuff don't care about such details.

In the US, I would argue that it is significantly easier to get Nestle chocolate than Zotter chocolate at grocery stores. The amount that the average person cares about the sugar content does not outweigh the extra effort required to acquire Zotter chocolate... Nestle is ubiquitous.

My wife occasionally buys 100% chocolate. Personally I think it tastes pretty terrible. 90% can be OK, but personally I don't like much over 80-85%

So that is pressed together cocoa?

Basically. Take the pure cocoa mass and just press it into bars.

I care. There isn't a Zotter in my country.

there are many great places to buy the world's chocolates from (my favorite is chocosphere) however for many it is what they will see in the check out lane or quickie mart that matters.

if they can still get their fix without all the excess calories; sugar isn't the worst thing; then please, encourage it more.

now just slip some fiber in there to make people feel full

Totally agree. I don't see the point in cutting sugar from this stuff or soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi. People drinking this stuff have already made up their mind that they don't care about healthy eating.

Also, people who consume the more "healthier" versions of soft drinks like Diet Coke or Coke Zero, they tend to over do it because they think they're it's affecting them less.

I've always thought as long as you're gonna be bad then do it right.

No point in consuming a neutered version of something bad when you've made up your mind to be bad.

I disagree, you're painting people with too broad a brush. Many of my colleagues drink a Coke once or twice a week when we go out to lunch as a team, and they aren't drinking two just because they now order a Zero instead. This is a real reduction in sugar consumption.

Similarly, people also drive more recklessly when using seatbelts, but they still save lives.

Please provide ANY proof that Coke Zero or Diet Coke is bad in any way. Post a study.

Why is healthier in quotes? Why do you believe artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and splenda have negative health impacts? Gut feeling? Please post a peer reviewed study done on humans.

I'm curious. What is your position on climate change, vaccines or GMOs? Do you follow scientific consensus by looking for peer reviewed studies, or wing it either way based on your gut feel and facebook memes?

geez, you really like soda. I have no skin in the game here, and I dont know the correct answer but there's some studies...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19151203

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2013/Q3/prof-diet-dr...

or, this wraps up some other links and discussion... http://therenegadepharmacist.com/diet-coke-exposed-happens-o...

Here's one:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v514/n7521/abs/nature13...

There's lots more, but your ability to google is every bit as good as mine.

Folks skeptical of artificial sweeteners are not anti-science morons. Man-made climate change is real, vaccines are one of the great accomplishments of civilization, and the science is promising but not fully settled on GMOs.

Consuming artificial sweeteners is almost certainly healthier than consuming the sugar they replace, but that doesn't actually make them _healthy_.

Woah no need to attack.

http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/32/4/688.short

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031938412...

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/739321

That google cache will expire. Here's a version of that link that'll last forever. http://archive.is/CyGmc

Yes, this is a major issue that people seem to be missing.

Sugar is used to bulk products. It's cheaper than almost all other ingredients.

Often you add salt to stop it getting to sweet.

If people wanted smaller products they could just eat 40% less so there will have to be something to replace it.

If milk chocolate is 50% sugar, and they cut sugar by 50% and replace it with cocoa, then wouldn't that make it 25% sugar and 75% cocoa? That sounds like not even remotely what people want.

Interesting. I wonder how much smaller a KitKat would be with 40% less sugar and nothing else added to make up the difference.

Other attempts at changing products "without any affect to the taste" have very much ruined their taste for me. If they do that to KitKat, I might have to take a day/week off work for mourning. I'm hoping since this is just a different sugar structure, I'll be ok.

Maybe around October next year I'll buy a spare freezer and start stocking up.

Kraft actually succeed in (stealthily) removing artificial colors from Mac and cheese and keeping the bright orange hue that we all love. Didn't change the taste. I say stealthily because they didn't announce the change until a year later and nobody seemed to notice for a year.

According to http://www.kitkat.co.uk/content/kitkatcollection , about 54% of the mass is sugar, so reducing that by 40% would cut the mass by roughly 22%.

Suppose it has 5% sugar, if you reduce that amount 40% it won't be much. Maybe they add some soy byproduct

I don't know where you're getting the 5% figure. It's more like 50% sugar content for most commercial chocolate products.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/262978.php

(One teaspoon weighs approximately 4 grams)

Just found a nutritional chart that says a 41g piece of Nestlé milk chocolate (probably worst case scenario) contains 27g of carbs.

Now, a volume of liquids and solids when mixed together do not necessarily add up to the same volume of the originals. For instance mixing a fluid ounce of alcohol and water won't result in 2 ounces of combined fluid.

So while they're talking about taking ~13g of sugar out of each serving (32% of the weight), that does not mean they need exactly 32% filler to make up the difference. Could be a lot less than that.

Several chocolate products in the UK seem already to have done the foam trick (add air), particular ones like Thorntons (individual chocolate box chocolates). You can only do that so much though. They used to be one of my favourites but now they're more like mousse than anything, the mouth feel is very poor and the flavour is greatly reduced - adding air with individual wrapped chocolates works commercially because they don't have a weight marked on them.

Cadbury, trimmed bars using carefully designed shapes (rounding off corners, adding curled edges) that seem as big; also adding cheap filler like popcorn or puffed rice.

Something like flour, maybe?

Polydextrose.

My guess is artificial sweetener, which by technicalities gets to say it's safer than it really is because of number-rounding laws. Or something?

FTA: "The company, which makes Kitkat and Aero, says its researchers have found a way to structure sugar differently, so that it uses 40% less."

Seems like they re-invented something like Splenda?

The difference here (if true) is that they say it doesn't affect taste - I've never had an artificial sugar than tastes anything like sugar.

And it has gotten worse lately. Many manufactures are doing half sugar and half artificial sweetener. And they never label it as such leading me to take a sip and promptly throw the rest away.

The sugar alcohols (like xylitol/erythritol/sorbitol/whatever-tol) are pretty darn close. Their problem is not so much taste as gastrointestinal upset though.

It should be noted that erythritol is not known for causing gastrointestinal issues. I don't really understand why we even use xylitol or sorbitol.

Yup, it's so superior that it seems ludicrous that others are considered comparable. The taste of it isn't quite like sugar, but it's close, and it's WAY better than any of the non-polyalcohol-sugar artificial sweeteners... and, IMO, is better tasting than isomalt, which comes second in tastiness to me, sorbitol 3rd place... I don't much like xylitol.

I've found xylitol tastes close enough to sugar, compared to all other sweeteners I've tried.

It does appear to get "dissolved" faster though, I can't really explain.

Xylitol is a sugar alcohol and not an artificial sweetener.

While it is technically a natural sugar alcohol, and can be refined from birch trees, most of the xylitol used in food products now is full synthetic or fermented with yeasts.

It is sweet. It is artificial (sometimes).

It may also draw additional water into your colon and have a "cool" mouth-feel, and it does add calories. Erythritol may be preferable for those reasons, even though it is less sweet. A common non-sugar sweetener mix is erythritol and stevia, which can, when proportioned correctly, add the same sweetness as an equal mass of refined sucrose.

xylitol is actually beneficial for your teeth. I really welcome a future of kit-kat bars made with xylitol, if its at all reasonable.

It's also a laxative, so be careful how much you consume.

Splenda is a totally different chemical compound, though, with a chlorine atom. The article makes it sound like it's still sugar but with a different physical arrangement of molecules.

Could it be air? Like, they physically structured the sugar granules to have tiny air pockets inside them? It doesn't necessarily have to be restructured at the molecular level...

The sugar in chocolate is dissolved, right? So there aren't any granules in the final product. They already mix air into most cheap chocolate-like candy products.

No, not fully dissolved. The sugar grain size is what determines smooth vs gritty mouth feel. There are micrographs on the harvard wiki, and in my video, linked from another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087023

There are porous aggregate sugar grains already in use. It's not that they're full of air, just smaller than usual particles (so they dissolve faster) roughly clumped into normal sized agglomerations.

Thanks! Should have known there was more to it than I realized, interesting.

This is the most plausible hypothesis I've heard since it's already been done with ice cream, and people actually enjoy and prefer the experience of it(despite the obvious downside of getting less Stuff).

One possibility is "instant sugar... now in chocolate!" discussed below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13087023

They can't really use artificial sweeteners to add bulk because those are much much sweeter than sugar per unit mass.

Balance the artificial sweeter with some sawdust to achieve the same mass and sweetness. Pretty sure that's legal...

I think the idea is that they can now remove 40% of the sugar and still achieve the same sweetness with no other sweeteners needed.

I guess I'm more cynical and skeptical of businesses which only have financial incentives in mind to do "good" things like this, but no ethical incentives.

What is an ethical incentive?

Nothing that Nestle is familar with.

If they remove 40% of the sugar they have to replace it with 40% of something else. Candy is sold by weight.

Removing the sugar only solves part of the problem

They don't have to replace it with anything if they don't want to. They could just make it smaller, sell it at a higher price (per weight).

Hershey has already done this quite a few times with their chocolate bars. They just get thinner and the texture gets waxier, I assume for structural integrity.

I'm shocked that this is the only mention of wax in the entire thread.

Last Hershey bar I tasted reminded me of those old novelty wax lips they used to give kids around Halloween. It's already to the point where you can actually taste the wax if you know the flavor.

I'm sure it'll be something along the lines of, "Hey, we're using 40% less sugar... we will be adding in some things like cane-juice crystals, corn syrup solids, and refiner's syrup to compensate." Don't you feel better already?

In the UK, concentrated grape juice is often added to products marketed for small kids and babies. Presumably a lot of parent read that and think 'oh, fruit, that's good for you!', not realising that this is essentially pure sugar.

They do that with apple juice in the United States. Apples and apple juice are incredibly cheap here.

In the U.S. can say the same of Apple Juice.

Bet they could rename sugar as "root vegetable extract" if it's derived from sugar-beet.

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