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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

> or lower the price of chocolate.

In the US, I can't even really buy chocolate anymore. About 3 or 4 years ago, it suddenly changed flavor... now it tastes like brown-colored wax to me. It was sudden and noticeable, and if I looked through old posts I could narrow it down to a particular month. This was across the board for all things Nestle and Hershey. Maybe if I got some snobby Eurochocolate, but I wouldn't know where. And sometimes I just like (or want to like) the candy bars I'd get as a kid. It's not the only food that's undergone one of these "now with 10% less sawdust" scenarios, Kraft mac'n'cheese comes to mind.

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3-4 years ago was the COVID epidemic. Are you sure you are not suffering loss of smell?

That seems about 1 trillion times more likely than that all of the chocolate sold here (made by many disparate producers) suddenly changed.

Looks like it happened earlier than I remember.

https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-for...

So no, not a trillion times more likely. But it's interesting that that's your first conclusion.

I’ll be honest I didn’t really read your comment far enough to get to where you said just two companies. You said you can’t buy chocolate in the USA and we have a wealth of chocolate. I guess being a foodie when someone mentions buying chocolate to me I don’t even think of Nestle or Hersheys, anymore than I’d think of Folgers and Maxwell House if someone said “I can’t buy coffee because it all changed”.

Guess I should read deeper before replying.

I recently was at a chocolate farm in Central America and they did talk about this change.

> I’ll be honest I didn’t really read your comment far enough to get to where you said just two companies. You said you can’t buy chocolate in the USA

Those two companies account for some large fraction of marketshare in the US. And since I didn't grow up eating $10/bar Geflaggersverkenfunkenderassen swiss chocolate, those hold little appeal anyway. Thanks though for admitting you just kind of ignored what I said, I figure that goes for the downvoters too.

I mean to be fair your wording didn’t help. You started saying you can’t even buy chocolate here.

Bud and Miller own about 2/3 of the beer market but I can find 100 craft beers within a block of me. Same with chocolates. If I said that all the beer suddenly started tasting bad it would be basically the same statement you made and a reasonable person would think the problem was something to do with me. People of course skim comments so when you lead with that, it’s natural.

There was not a point in living memory where you couldn’t buy much better chocolate than Hersheys in any grocery store. So your statement doesn’t make much sense.

One could be forgiven for thinking that, but about a year later I found articles talking about how they decided to remove cocoa butter from their recipes because it cost too much.

The mac'n'cheese thing was funny too. There were half a dozen reddit threads with people complaining that it started tasting different. Then, completely oblivious, Kraft does a press release a few months later about how they changed the formula and it was so successful no one even noticed. Whatever minuscule amount of cheese they used in the powder cost too much and was replaced with god knows what.

Substitution-flation made everything taste like shit, and no one even said anything.

In the food industry (and probably others) this is called salami slicing. You take one thin slice off the salami and you can’t tell the difference. Then a little while later you do it again.

Eventually the salami is half the size it used to be and nobody notices until they get the original again.

Most Americans eat garbage all day so when it gets a little garbagier they can’t tell.

“Waxy” is the normal taste for chocolate produced using vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter or otherwise skimping on the dairy content (one of the main reasons why cheap US chocolate is so awful), but I don’t think that’s new in the last 3-4 years.

Multiple varieties of "snobby Eurochocolate" are sold prominently in the candy and/or snack aisles of my podunk town's Walmart and grocery store. I've never had any trouble getting it, and with domestic candy prices having gone through the roof since the pandemic, the price difference isn't as much as you might think.

A Hershey bar is like a dollar. You can find good chocolate bars for $2-3 and there's no real difference between a $7 chocolate bar and a $20 chocolate bar (unless you're buying it right at the chocolatier).

The cost of "upgrading" your chocolate to good or even great will run you about $100 a year. Worth it, in my books.

It’s not snobby to buy food that isn’t produced by the largest, most evil food corps in the world.

It has relatively little to do with Europe either.

Go for Tony’s imo.

Changed suddenly 3-4 years ago... long COVID?

Skimpflation has impacted many things.

Did you try whole foods?

Thats where my hippy parents get their chocolate and I mean that in a positive way.

Did you happen to get infected with COVID-19 during that period?

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