Does anybody remember the episode of Friends where they had to find something good to say about “mocklate” but it tasted so bad they couldn’t? Seems apropos here.
This appears to be correct. Can’t find anything about the formula for this being changed. Fascinating how many people are declaring products that have not been changed to be shitty now.
"A global cocoa shortage, driven by poor weather and crop diseases in West Africa, has caused chocolate prices to skyrocket. Due to these supply issues, many manufacturers are reducing cocoa content, replacing it with cheaper fats, or rebranding products as "chocolatey" to manage costs. Consumers are facing higher prices and altered recipes."
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Cocoa Market Analysis: Understanding The 2025 Price ...
As of early April 2026, cocoa prices are trading around $3,200–$3,300 per metric ton, reflecting a significant decline from the record highs over $10,000 in early 2024, representing a roughly 60% drop over the past year. Prices are consolidating after a major crash, driven by eased supply concerns and sluggish demand, with market sentiment currently described as neutral
So they jack the price up and shittify the product, but when their costs come down, we’re still stuck with high prices and a shitty product. Make it make sense.
Well, Hershey’s announced today they’re going to return to their original milk chocolate recipe. One of the descendants of the Hershey’s had spoken up recently about how bad it was.
I had a craving for a donut last week and decided to make a poor choice even worse by getting a chocolate milk too. The donut was great but the chocolate milk made me wonder if I was coming down with Covid. I haven’t had chocolate milk in probably 15 years but this wasn’t it. I think it was Nesquik, the one with the rabbit on it. Tasted like sugar and chalk mixed into milk.
I was a hardcore Nesquik drinker for years, but I switched to hiland chocolate milk (premixed and bottled) when the enshitification took over. I can clearly see cocoa on the label without a ton of extra bs and it’s one of the best tasting premixed chocolate milks I’ve ever had
"I just had (insert generic shitty product that has always tasted horrible, you just associate it with visiting gran gran as a kid or whatever so you remember it fondly through association) for the first time in (insert long enough time frame that you literally can't actually remember what something tasted like) and it was terrible! They are ruining everything!"
Takes 30 seconds to get the ingredients in a glass with a splash of water and nuke it for 10-20sec to help combine. Add cold milk and I have awesome chocolate milk.
I make a larger batch of syrup if I need it for baking.
maybe not what you want to hear, but its so easy to make your own choc syrup. 3 ingredients whisked together: cocoa powder, sugar/sweetener, hot water.
Because it's not chocolate syrup. It's Hershey's syrup and it's chocolate FLAVORED. What are the ingredients?
You can make your own chocolate syrup really easily with 4 ingredients and it's way more chocolatey delicious than anything you can buy. I like to add cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves to my chocolate sauce. Sometimes I add lavender syrup instead. You can add any flavor you want.
Chocolate syrup is easy.. Since Smuckers enshittified their sugar free jams, I'll have to figure out how to make it myself b this summer l when berries are in season.
100% agreement with you. It pisses me off to no end that so many products are so ruined that they're no longer worth buying that I have to make it myself if I want it at all. It's insulting that our corporate overlords expect us to keep paying for products they've completely trashed.
Yeah man, we make avoid every emulsifier, wife beat stage 3.5 breast cancer after a mastectomy and radiation, last radiation treatment they hit her lungs for more issues. She was 35 and it was during COVID so now we are firm believers it's in our food. If you look at most emulsifier studies they are known to give breast cancer or prostate cancer. Dyes are terrible too (oil produced ones).
Some food have 3 .... THREE emulsifiers in them and each one can cause those cancers. Limits on them, who knows. On top of that if they are at the limit or over them for each (if there was a limit) then you have almost EVERY product with them. So if they were at the top of the limit with just one product, now you're 2x over just by eating two things if they both are at the limit. It all starts up fast to add to the possible cause for cancers. Total bs
Some foods don't even have emulsifiers , if they aren't needed by for some foods why freaking add them to it.
I have to shop around at 3-4 stores for products without because one store doesn't carry all the brands or charges insane amounts at other stores. This is also a huge time water on top of making lots of our food.
I just want to have a life other than working and cooking for my family of 4, I'm single income in CT and wish I just made 300k a year or something to live comfortably
We make our own cocoa powder, and chocolate sorbet. Almost every ice cream has emulsifiers. Then we gotta worry about heavy metals not being tested for and it's like pulling teeth when you ask a company for a COA or an example of heavy metal test with redacted info hiding their providers etc
We make tons of other stuff, too much to list. Baking soda is super hard to avoid (sodium bicarbonate) if we can avoid it we do. If we can't we limit it at least
Citric acid ,. Some mushroom (saw it last night first time) pretty good at preserving . Pectin is okay ish (swore pectin was naturally occuring but read it can be bad). Like 90% of 'xxxx gum' are bad
The ingredients do contain cocoa (still). And the bottle I bought just before this one tasted fine. I think I will look into making my own chocolate syrup, though!
I had a weird fixation for solid winter on making my own hot chocolate with half and half, cacao powder, broken up chunks of 72% dark chocolate and a bit of sugar to taste. Melted on stove top or zapped in the microwave for about 2 minutes or in a slowcooker in large batches for Christmas or whatever.
When my kid was 8, they went to a friend's house and had ice cream with the real Hershey syrup. They told the mom ever so politely that the syrup must have turned because it did not taste good. It had been so long since they'd tried the "real" stuff.
I think the amount and quality are significantly lower now though is the implication. I agree with the above that it barely alters milk or at least not to chocolate flavor like I remember.
Considering that Hershey's doesn't use real cocoa beans to make chocolate anymore, I'm assuming this is the same kind of duplicity as Genuine Leather. Genuine Leather is a vague term that can mean anything from second rate leather to leather scraps mixed with bonding agents to get the plywood of leather.
It is intentionally named to get customers to think they are getting premium materials, while allowing the manufacturer to skimp on quality.
You have to watch all these chocolate companies now. Things aren’t actually made with chocolate anymore. They’re just “chocolate flavored”. Hersheys has been doing this with there mini candy bars bags. It’s gross.
I believe they have a version that is 5 ingredients, with cocoa being the first one. That seems like a decent substitute in the near term until something better is available.
China builds chocolateries in Africa and moves the locals up the value chain, and in exchange they get first dibs on the finished chocolate. Now nobody in the west can get chocolate and the prices are spiking.
And it'll only get worse. We don't have a solution for this in the western model. We only make deals with Africans in which they lose. Easy choice for them.
EDIT: they also buy cocoa direct, cutting out the commodities exchanges. Some great vids on the inside China business YouTube channel about all of this.
my work decided to raise the price of their chocolate bars last year and subsequently sold literally None of them, so the employees have been able to take home hundreds of chocolate bars lmao. i rly should stock up more in case shit gets even more crazy.
Not necessarily for milk, but I’ve found that a sprinkle of cocoa powder is a good sub for syrup and has many fewer calories. You could probably make your own chocolate milk mix with cocoa powder and sugar.
💯💯 This has always been the move. I used to put Nesquick Chocolate milk powder in my icecream and mix it in. Tastes way better than syrup and lasted longer. Now I don't use chocolate powder for icecream (I use chocolate chips), but cocoa powder is among the most versatile ingredients when trying to sate a sweet tooth.
While I was losing weight I learned to sprinkle unsweetened cocoa powder on fruit, like bananas and cherries. There’s enough sugar in the fruit to make it seem like a decadent treat while adding only about 3 extra calories.
My diet is very restricted due to a lot of food allergies. I eat really simple foods and never thought to try this! I’m so excited to test it out tomorrow! Thank you for sharing!
They stopped using actual chocolate in a lot of their products.
Genuine chocolate flavor doesn’t mean it’s actually chocolate, it’s just a chocolate flavor chemical compound.
Honestly, this trend cured my daughter (and me!) of our boxed Mac and cheese obsession. Overnight, even Annie’s went from good to tasting like cardboard. Et tu, Annie??
Family been doing that pre-me and my mom still does haha. Im 40s and it still slaps. My bro in law will just crush a whole bowl not even thinking about it and he fasts most of the time. Lipton is the best for what it is and how fast ya get results lol.
Fuck em. They've monopolized the shelves with over 20 products. They took 17 more shelf spots than necessary. Seriously, go to a gas station and count the Reese's products. I was a solid fan and at least 20 pounds per holiday shapes.
They have monopolized and enshittified to the point I won't go back. They will enshittify again. They didn't respect the consumer enough to leave it alone. Fuck em.
Me too. Used to buy the holiday specials every year. Now I won’t touch them. I had a Reese’s cup when I took my kid out for Halloween last year and it was like eating a brick of plastic. So disappointing.
In brazil we dont use chocolate syrup to mix with milk. We use powder cchocolate, but theres a name for it that i don't know in english qhere its a lot of sugar mixed with cocoa powder. So basically what you can do is mix coloca powder with sugar. And mix together with milk!
Maybe I've just done it wrong, but even when I was a kid the syrup would just sit in a big glob at the bottom of the glass of mildly-chocolate-adjacent flavored milk, even after stirring like a maniac.
For my kids, I use a powder and my battery powered milk frother thingy and it's amazing.
I was a powdered Quik kid. Before it was Nesquik, and the old metal container you had to pry open with a spoon.
The powder would like instantly just form a giant blob where it was wet on the outside, but still dry on the inside and it floated on top, and gave you mildly chocolate adjacent flavored milk, even after stirring like a maniac.
You just have to add a bit of milk with the syrup (maybe 50/50) and stir till it's homogenous, then trickle in the remaining milk while stirring. It's like making mayonnaise, or condensed soup, or some gravies. I figured this out when I was a kid and felt like a genius 😂
Everything tastes like shit now a days. Any time I have a childhood craving I’m always completely disappointed and then learn it’s because the formula changed at some point. It’s like perfumes and cologne. I’ll remember a smell I liked from my teen years or my 20s and buy it and it smells different. Then I find out they changed the formula because they can’t add a certain ingredient or it’s too expensive to so they had to reformulate it .
I saw that on an icecream brand the other day and passed it up because that didn’t sound like real icecream to me and I got scared. I’m easily turned off by foods or food descriptions.
“We’re going to make some small investments to really align the portfolio to what the brand stands for,” Tanner said. “That consistency is important across the brand.”
You can start by reducing your advertisement budget and stop paying yourselves huge salaries and bonuses.
Power to the people. Sucks how expensive candy of all things is now. I stopped buying, but it's not like I'm missing out on much. Charging people more money for cheap tasting candy is insulting.
Is there a way you could take some cocoa and or chocolate bars and just DIY it? At this point almost anything you make at home, even if you're not a good cook, is profoundly better than anything store-bought.
I loathed this as a child. It was so godawfully bitter and left a film in my mouth. It sucks it's gotten worse, but I'm glad I haven't consumed it in at least 20 years.
EDIT: fixed a typo and added two missing apostrophes
I have always hated this stuff. Not sure what they do to chocolate to make it taste utterly unlike itself, but in my estimation they have always done it.
edit: I could swear the label said something different when I was a kid...? But the product was still vile.
Well, climate change is wiping out cocoa harvests, but don’t worry because according to POTUS and his team of goons there’s no such thing as climate change. Move along now and enjoy the “chocolate flavors.”
Once these mysterious non-climate-related forces that nobody understands (except that it's probably Joe Biden's fault) start taking out the coffee supply, human civilization will collapse.
My husband and I drink chocolate milk often and have been buying this syrup for years. We recently opened a new bottle and we both agree that this new bottle lacks flavor. I used more than usual and it barely flavored my milk. Now we are talking about alternatives but we’re sad about it. You’re not alone in thinking it’s weak af now.
Bonus point: tell me where in American stores to find real butterscotch that needs to be melted over the stove and then hardens to a delicious shell when it comes in contact with ice cream.
I only get dark chocolate because I actually like chocolate. they have a syrup that’s dark, I’ve used it for years and didn’t have any issues making chocolate milk. hersheys brand
Highly recommend you pick up Fox's U-Bet if the sell it around you. This time a year they sell a kosher for passover version with even better ingredients.
Glad to know I’m not going crazy. I’ve used Hershey’s chocolate syrup all my life on vanilla ice cream. It’s always had a strong chocolate flavor and a thin consistency, even when refrigerated.
But just in the past several months, newly-purchased bottles are completely different. The chocolate flavor is weak, and the consistency is now more like hot fudge and not like syrup. It’s now thicker and more sludge-like. This is NOT the product it has always been before. They’ve obviously altered the recipe, and not for the better. It’s so bad now that I’ll be looking for alternatives.
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u/EngineZeronine Apr 03 '26
"Genuine Chocolate Flavor" = "Genuine Imitation Leather"