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.
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.
