All I know is that in the years since Mondelez bought Cadbury the quality of their chocolate has gone down the tubes. Despite public pronouncements that they haven't altered their recipes.
Yes, but their quality was also pretty low to begin with.
Cadbury is the reason why the EU, unlike the US, allows chocolate to be adulterated with up to 5% margarine. If the Germans, Italians or French had their way, only pure cocoa butter could be used, and by that standard Cadbury could not be legally be sold in the EU as "chocolate", so the British put their veto.
Now that Brexit has happened, I keep hoping the EU will reverse that travesty but I guess industrial chocolate makers have gotten used to the profits from selling mockolate for the price of chocolate and are resisting going back to proper standards.
Having moved to the UK from the US I have watched the Cadbury saga with amusement. As a well-travelled food snob I have known for decades that US chocolate (e.g. Hershey et al) is absolute shit. What I find hilarious is that people in the UK are quick to, rightly, point this out but then turn around and try to tell me that Cadbury is somehow 'good' chocolate. Now I get to see them moan that it has taken some dramatic turn for the worse after the takeover when at most it is a slight step down from an already low bar. Few Americans have access to good European chocolate so I can excuse their ignorance, but you can walk into a corner Tesco and get a bar of mid-grade German or Swiss for not much more than what is being paid for the mediocre Cadbury product...
That's supposed to be the butryic acid content. I don't know if Americans are just so used to it that they don't really notice but Hershey's smells just a little bit like vomit which is, I'd say, "a dramatic turn for the worse" for sure.
I think very much it's 'used to it'. I had read about there being some butyric acid in Hershey's and this was part of its distinctive taste and shrugged it off, not knowing what that meant; a while later I went to Europe and while there, enjoyed plenty of candy. I came back and a month later bit into a bar and immediately went oh.
fwiw I realise that I've actually misread the parent comment here and that the dramatic turn for the worse bit was about the Kraft takeover. Cadbury's doesn't really have this issue at the moment and imo while it's suffered a quality drop it's only really marginal. I think they ruined cream eggs at one point but they seem to have returned to something edible as far as I can tell.
That said I'm still uneasy about allowing the sale of a British company with over a hundred years of years of history to a massive foreign conglomerate.
America also has a huge number of passionate and outstanding craft chocolate-makers like Amano or Guittard. Also some poseurs like Mast Brothers or Dandelion Chocolate, unfortunately, but in most urban areas you have plenty of options other than Hershey's. I'd say the availability of good chocolate is probably better than in the UK from my personal experience in San Francisco and London, but then again SF is not incredibly representative of the US in general.
Why do few Americans have access to european chocolate? It's not like fresh fruits that go off easily/require climate controls, seems like it would be pretty easy to ship over the atlantic?
> Why do few Americans have access to european chocolate?
Americans both make good chocolate and have ready access to good foreign chocolate, which is in pretty much every grocery store. Many Americans are habituated to low-quality chocolate, or particular products where low-quality chocolate is a component but the quality of the chocolate doesn't particulary stand out because of nuts, salt, caramel, nougat, etc.
It's available in enormous quantities at every Walmart and Walgreens even in the most backwater towns in the country. The only place you would struggle to find one is at some gas stations, and even then lots of gas stations now have fancy stuff. Not to mention on Amazon, which also delivers to even the most out of the way places.
It actually does require some measure of climate control. It does melt in non climate controlled warehouses and trucks in the summer months. It's a pain to handle chocolate at the distribution level.
We also have access to genuinely good chocolate. European chocolates have the added markup up being imported, so they fill a small niche that you have to go out of your way to find.
Hersheys and other candy bars are like fast food- ubiquitous but far, far away from being our only or best options.
I'll confirm this. Basically all grocery stores, most drug stores, and a lot of convenience stores sell Ghirardelli in particular. The U.S. also has a large range of boutique chocolate companies that aren't hard to find and buy from if you care.
Why do Americans eat so much Hershey's? I have no idea. Why do they buy ice cream stripped of milk fat, filled with air, and thickened with gum? Most don't know what they're missing I guess.
> Why do Americans eat so much Hershey's? I have no idea. Why do they buy ice cream stripped of milk fat, filled with air, and thickened with gum? Most don't know what they're missing I guess.
I suspect because of a penchant to substitute quantity for quality. I make my own vanilla ice cream...with no sugar. Just pure cream, a little whole milk, egg yolks, and vanilla, cooked as a custard. Lots and lots of vanilla. It is extremely rich and decadent, I can't find a comparable ice cream anywhere else.
It is also obscenely expensive compared to any retail ice cream, though I can easily afford it; the vanilla (or its extract if I'm in a hurry) is the most expensive part per gram, but that cream gets spendy as well when compared to store bought brands. I only make it once a month because it is so flavorful that eating it more often turns it into a less pleasant experience, because it can get cloying when tasted too frequently. I can easily see why anyone who makes ice cream a frequent dessert or snack food will gravitate towards far cheaper and less flavor-packed alternatives.
I moved to Sweden before Cadbury’s was sold, I wasn’t aware that Cadburys had been sold when I came back to the UK for a visit.
I genuinely thought that the chocolate had been “re-melted”. You know that waxy taste when chocolate has been out in the sun too much and hardened again and that’s happened a few times?
So, I chalked it up to a bad batch or that the store had stored it incorrectly.
To my horror the same was true of the chocolate in the airport when I was going home.
So; it’s not a placebo; I didn’t know, I only know because I complained to my Mum and she explained what happened later.
In Finland we get Marabou in our stores, but our local competitor Fazer (still privately owned) is miles ahead. Marabou got a little edge when it came to market with combos with other chocolates like Daim. It didn’t take a long time until Fazer made flavour combos from their own lineup, and they took back the throne.
If you have a chance to try Fazer chocolate then try it (sometimes stylized as Karl Fazer).
Marabou chocolate is of mediocre quality at best. Chocolate from the other large Swedish confectionery manufacturer, Cloetta, is even worse and on par with Cadbury. I usually buy imported Dutch or Swiss chocolate.
Marabou was tasty mass market, and they also declined after the purchase. My wife used to bring some Walter’s Mandler back, and gave up after the change.
Yes. Went to work in Cadbury Birmingham when I was a student something like 30 years ago. With perks like unlimited Cadbury Chocolate. I remember thinking I was in heaven.
I am not sure which came first, moving their factory out to continental Europe or sold to Kraft. But the quality definitely dropped. May be "quality" isn't the right word from a QA perspective. But they definitely tasted different. And it wasn't a one off thing either. It changed a few times over the years. Probably before Kraft, after Kraft and then Mondelez. There were even some Cadbury from Poland that I think was owned by Lotte from South Korea. Or something like that. And it taste very different.
It is similar story with Heinz Ketchup and bake beans. They keep saying they are the same.
The sale to Kraft came first, I distinctly remember because they promised the British government they wouldn’t move production out of the UK then did shortly after the acquisition closed.
In New Zealand 20 years ago they were a generally loved brand with the majority of the market. Since the Mondelez sale they closed the local factory and started making everything in Australia.
Besides the general drop in quality (palm oil etc) they got rid of popular products or changed their recipes. They still have a reduced but big share but other brands get all the respect.
I find Whittakers (from NZ) to be a great alternative. Ever since Australian Cadbury's changed their recipe, it seems to give me a "burning" sensation. Whittakers tastes like a decent supermarket chocolate used to taste like.
So there is a history of changing things and not saying.
That all said, I find coca cola tastes different depending upon location of production. Personally I found the south African cola tastes better, then Canadian and was able to blind taste them. So hardly not all brands are that verbatim across production lines globally and if a production line is moved, so does it's sourced ingredients more so as well as quality of aforementioned ingredients. Equally, local regulation may also play into those small changes.
But then wine from different years, from the same production run/winery will taste different and that is probably the best example of how ingredient changes, however small, play a big factor in the end product.
My dad used to bring a pack of American Coca-Cola back any time he went. It's not even close to the British equivalent. I believe it's due to the good old high fructose corn syrup.
I will agree the glass bottle versions taste better, from my observations/experience, it seems to be down to how the co2 reacts in the container and I find the plastic bottle the co2 is somewhat smaller and light in the taste, the cans - somewhat better and medium and yet the glass bottle. Ah yes the glass bottles just seem to have large bubble into the mix and in the taste, that just is a factor that stands out.
Though an easy one to test for yourself, get cola form same area - plastic bottle, can and glass bottle and blind taste for yourself and see if you can notice the difference. It is one I could do, though not done for a while and yet was so standout.
I will add that the diet version of the drinks do somewhat not lend themselves to such taste differences and talking fall fat sugar variations of cola here.
I will concur from my observations, the sugar as well as the water used for production, do seem to be the dicerning factors in varaition.
That's funny. American Coke snobs drink Mexican Coke from glass bottles, the usual explanation being corn syrup is worse than white sugar. Similarly, Texans bus "Dublin Dr. Pepper" bottled in Dublin, TX for the same reason.
I'm certain the cocoa solids quantity has been reduced - some of their products barely even taste like chocolate any more!
Indeed, I saw one of their "Buttons" products recently, which didn't even say "chocolate" on the front - I presume because the cocoa content was so low they wouldn't be allowed to claim that.
Both can be true: They might just use ingredients of much lower quality now. You can definitely taste the quality of cocoa and fat - some high-quality brands have chocolates with single-origin cocoa, which can taste wildly different even though the recipe is the same.
Other than that, it's exceedingly easy to find Ghirardelli chocolate in particular in grocery stores, Wal-Mart, Target, Walgreens, etc. Many more options are available at high end and specialty stores like organic grocery stores. And, of course, there's always online ordering for the especially dedicated.
Besides all that, there are innumerable chocolate alternative craft candymakers catering to crowds that want alternative sweeteners, fats, etc. They're not really for me, but business seems to be going well for them.
Recommending craft chocolate is kind of missing the point. You can buy expensive specialist chocolate anywhere, but that's not the same sector of the market that Cadbury occupies. You should be comparing it to stuff like Hershey's.
Ghirardelli is easily available so it's not that "craft". And, yeah, it costs maybe twice Hershey's, but if someone is that hard up for a few bucks, chocolate itself probably needs to be less of the budget.
Mostly I'm pushing back on the meme that Americans don't produce or appreciate good chocolate. They do, though bigco chocolate certainly has better market share, product placement, mind share, etc.
> For All Things, the big challenge is handling temperamental chocolate in India’s hot and humid climate. Besides the risk of the chocolate melting on delivery, moisture can also compromise its quality, meaning that the company has to maintain just the right temperature in its kitchen. But on particularly humid days, especially during the monsoon season, production simply has to stop.
One thing I have noticed is that Cadbury in the UK is different from Cadbury in other Countries. I suspect they alter their recipes for the target climate - Cadbury in the UK melts if you look at it the wrong way, whereas Cadbury in Australia/NZ tends to do better in heat. Also they tend to have factories closer to their target destinations and they seem to have some trouble exactly replicating the conditions - perhaps background temperature, altitude, humidity, etc, also play a role.
Cadbury (UK version) is perfectly serviceable: it's sweet, milky/creamy, melts in the mouth and is relatively smooth. Some other chocolates may be better, but Cadbury is hardly bad at the price point. Contrast that to some cheap Lidl chocolate for example and it tastes rough and unblended, like all the components are there but they never came together.
I'm not sure why would anyone like what Cadbury sells in the UK. Almost any European brand of chocolate is better than Cadbury, which is extremely sweet. I understand I may be biased not being British, but still.
I guess it's mainly that "better" is largely subjective and the people pitching bitter, high price, high cocoa bars usually have an axe to grind. Often they use various tricks to sell a tiny sliver of chocolate, using cardboard to hide how thin it is, fancy packaging to distract you and up market branding to make you feel better about it. Personally I'm fine with what market forces deliver - mainly UK focused bars with some variety for those who like to stand out for whatever reason. I'm glad that US chocolate doesn't generally take much of the UK market as it has a tendency to taste rancid to my palette (but again probably highly subjective, each to their own!)
Granted at the start, I'm in the US, so I'm not sure what it's like in the UK. Sure, there's plenty of Hershey/Cadbury type cheap (but often satisfying) stuff here, and plenty of expensive crap that's nothing but branding, and sounds like what you're describing.
But there's also a huge variety of high cocoa, low sugar bars available that are great tasting, not overly expensive, and not skimpy. Once you skip all the sugar and diary, the complexities of the cacao flavors come through so much stronger, and different chocolates can have very different flavor profiles. It's really a different product from the strongly sweetened chocolate bars. It's definitely true that chocolate snobbery is rampant, and its annoying (as you say, to each their own), but to dismiss the variety of dark, less sweet chocolates available as people having and axe to grind is a shame.
You are missing a wide range in between. I hate buttery fakeolat, I also am not interested in eating raw cacao beans (ie pure chocolate). Both are idiotic assaults on the tastebuds.
Never realized how good I had it in the Netherlands. The fakeolat is pretty rare (cheap, bottom of the barrel kid chocolat that no sane adult goes near) and the cacao purist I simply ignore.
Kinder Bueno is a good example of what I'm taking about. I know it has hazelnuts in. There's no bitter cocoa 'kick', just a sticky sweet taste. It's like chocolate for people who don't like the taste of chocolate.
Nutella is literally and explicitly hazelnut flavoured, there is a hint in the name. That is a terrible example; quite possibly the worst you could have used. I cannot emphasise enough how bad an example that is, and how much it implies that you haven’t done your research into this.
As for Milka and Kinder, they’re not exactly high quality brands. Milka is even owned by Mondelez, same as Cadbury. They are not indicative of the quality of most European chocolate (in the same way that Hershey’s is in no way indicative of the quality of
good American chocolatiers)
I’m confused with Lindt though. I’ve had plenty of
their dark chocolate, from barely above milk-chocolate to 99% cacao solids, and none of it has ever had a distinct hazelnut flavour. I have to seriously ask: are you sure you know what hazelnut tastes like?
> Nutella is literally and explicitly hazelnut flavoured
Given that (at least in the US) it isn't marketed as chocolate or a chocolate spread but as a “hazelnut spread with cocoa”, I’d say that's a bit of an understatement.
There are other American craft chocolatiers. Just like there are many high quality American brewers though brands like Budweiser and Miller are called "American beers".
A quick summary is that the aftertaste is a chemical that's in vomit, so if you're not used to it in chocolate then the chocolate literally tastes of puke. But if you are used to it, from your childhood, then it tastes great. It's also the same chemical that gives parmesan cheese its pungency, so it's not like Americans are alone in liking it in their food.
When I was young I dated an American girl who would regularly gift me Hershey's products, which all tasted like it was several years past its expiry date. Since living in the USA I've gradually got used to it, to the point where I actually like it o_O
> One thing I have noticed is that Cadbury in the UK is different from Cadbury in other Countries.
Irish Dairy Milk is the best!
My wife’s family is Irish and I spend a lot of time there. Their Dairy Milk is much creamier, much like their milk. I think their blue top “full” milk is much closer to the old “gold top” we used to have here in the UK.
My in-laws will send over “care packages” of all my wife’s favourite things, Dairy Milk, Tayto Crisps, Red Lemonade and many other little treats.
If you don’t have the opportunity to visit Ireland (you should, it’s beautiful and the people are the best) you can buy Irish Dairy Milk online for delivery on sites catering for Irish expats so you can sample it.
Unfortunately this seems to have changed very recently. Not sure the cause, but there's been a sudden and complete loss of quality in Cadbury products, including Dairy Milk, in Ireland. Chocolate tastes like Nestle now. As discussed (repeatedly) on the Ireland subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/search?q=Cadbury%27s+shite&...
There may well have been a decline in quality but the overarching theme of /r/Ireland is that everything is awful all the time, so I would take those results with a pinch of salt. It's an overwhelmingly negative subreddit that complains about everything.
That's a fair criticism, but anecdata though it may be, their chocolate does taste dramatically different to me. I would say that it's not just a recent shift though - the smoothness and richness has been gradually being replaced by waxiness and a softer / cheaper flavour in recent years.
You’re not wrong, we do love a good moan in (/r/)Ireland, but I do think there has been a noticeable decline in quality of cadburys products based on offline anecdata.
If you want good chocolate in an Irish supermarket, I’d usually recommend either Lindt or the supermarket’s own brand (which is more often than not a rebranding of relatively decent European chocolate).
> My wife’s family is Irish and I spend a lot of time there. Their Dairy Milk is much creamier, much like their milk. I think their blue top “full” milk is much closer to the old “gold top” we used to have here in the UK.
I wouldn't be surprised if it is creamier if they source their dairy locally. I miss gold top milk! I always try to buy butter from Ireland too, it tends to be richer in flavour.
The insanity of the current situation in the UK is that there is a sugar tax (I once got sugar-taxed on a sugar free drink), sweet snacks have been suffering from shrink-flation (or inflation if we're talking about a freddo), and yet, for all of these efforts there is still an obesity crisis. If there is going to be an obesity crisis anyway, it might as well be from nice food.
I noticed that Guinness is by far the best when you buy it in Ireland. Mainland Britain is second best, and then it seems to get worse the further out you get. There is not a nicer beer than a fresh hearty Guinness.
Noticed this also! Always assumed had bad luck with a batch or it was just sitting at the airport shop for too long. So my taste did not fool me! Thanks for the explanation. Must now find a way to order cross country without melting...
One example is french baking. Any good break or croissant is very hard to reproduce in some countries, like Thaïland or Australia, because of the climate. Temperature and humidity plays a huge role.
I remember being surprised that my Australian friends thought Cadbury was "great chocolate" in 2006 (before the Mondelez acquisition in 2010).
That was the first time I got to sample it myself.
It never was as far as my base of comparison is concerned.
Maybe it got worse after the acquisition but by the chocolate standards set by the circumstances of my birthplace (Germany) and it's surroundings I was exposed to fantastic chocolate from an early age. My grandma only gave us Swiss chocolate for bdays/xmas.
It's simply what you know. Cadbury (or Mondelez) can't be blamed for offering a cheap product that somehow satisfies consumer expectations in their target markets.
Yeah, a lot of people in Eastern Europe similarly associate Milka as quality chocolate (which is true compared to local ones). But once you taste high quality Swiss ones, most of the 'celebrated' ones taste like mediocre sugary goo (I would say high quality baseline for me is Lindt dark ones, but only those made in Switzerland). There are many small artisanal chocolate producers en Suisse, but their prices are easily 3x of Lindt and the quality is very similar (for me).
Its interesting to see the difference even within Lindt - you can buy tons of Lindt in EU and elsewhere, often for 50% of the Swiss price. But the taste is definitely subpar - the rich beautiful chocolatey flavors I can sense ie in the 70% salted one bought here in Switzerland are quite bland (but still fine when compared to ie Milka, Cadbury or many Belgian ones) when buying exactly same looking ones made ie in France or Germany (the only visible difference is really tiny fine print of Made in ...).
I used to like milka but at some point started eating bitter/lower sugar chocolate and find it hard to enjoy milka/ritter sport type chocolates these days - they taste way too sweet. Generally as I age i find it harder to enjoy chocolates, even better brands (I live in Germany).
Obsessed is hardly how I would described India's relationship with Cadbury; it is more like Indians didn't know any better because there were hardly any better/decent alternatives with equal or better marketing prowess during the formative years of the Indian consumer with decent spending power (say, between mid 70's to mid/late 90's, loosely speaking). It is akin to their relationship with coffee with respect to Nescafe which was the absolute dominating brand (lesser brands like Bru were present but they didn't make much of a dent and frankly, weren't that much different/better either). Someone for whom the only exposure to coffee has been Nescafe would spit gourmet coffee out on the grounds that its taste is so different ("soooo bitter...") to what he/she considers "good" coffee (i.e. Nescafe). Of course that is no longer the case for younger folks who are regulars to cafes serving gourmet coffee.
In the early days of the EU, there were lawsuits over whether the British should even be able to market their chocolate as chocolate, given its higher milk and oil content and lower cocoa content. I don't say that to disparage British chocolate; having grown up in Ireland, I don't have any issue with Cadbury. But it drives home the point that British and European chocolates are rather different products. Sometimes I want a Cadbury; sometimes I want a Lindt. If I have a craving for one, the other won't do. American chocolate like Hershey is different again; I think it tastes awful and am tempted to say it is objectively worse, but it's probably again more accurate to say it is a different (though superficially similar) product targeting a different audience.
Hershey I think is meant to be melted. Eating it solid it tastes like chocolate with sawdust mixed in. There is good chocolate here but Hershey isn’t it.
There's something very European about precise regulations and intense lobbying regarding what counts as chocolate.
I don't care that much as long as the ingredients in the package are accurate. Especially if the competition is allowed to point out what makes their chocolate superior.
It sounds silly but then I read and watch stories of americans crying out for their old ice cream brands which went from milk based to something completely different based. All done in secret.
Cadbury has brand recognition and prestige. It's the same in Ireland (another former British colony): some people still consider Cadbury to be some kind of premium product, a name to be conjured with. I guess it was premium in the 1950s, and it certainly gets heavily advertised.
The point of the article is that it is challenging to get such people (nostalgic, traditional, and unimaginative) to consider genuinely gourmet chocolate. I don't think it has anything to do with differences between Cadbury's taste and that of the new products.
I’m right into artisanal dark chocolate. Started on 75%, now 86%. I go for anything fair trade, and no palm oil. My wife and I enjoy tiny slivers of an evening now and then.
Cadburys tastes like slavery and dead orang-utans now.
Cadbury is already so much better than mass market chocolate in the USA. I am born here and grew up with it and I still don't understand how anyone can eat USA mass market chocolate.
For those outside the U.K. some background on Cadbury’s might be of interest. It might be surprising that many brits get a warm glow when thinking of Cadbury’s chocolate - partly because 1) it’s pretty ubiquitous so kids grow up getting used to it 2) great marketing and 3) Cadbury’s always had a reputation as a very good employer.
I can’t comment on the quality but the Mondelez / Kraft takeover has certainly dented 3) and I’m reasonably sure the brand has suffered as a result.
Quality chocolate is gone for good. As long as the main ingredients are sugar and hidrogenated oil the future looks bad. Also the monopolies like Lindt or Mondelez prevent others from accesing the market.
Die-hard Hershey's fan here. Maybe I'm a pleb, but I am not a fan of "artisanal" anything (these guys put the "anal" in "artisanal"). I only eat maybe one bar a week. I probably get ten times the amount of palm oil in my wife's cooking (she's a Filipina), and at 51, I can still run two miles better than most 30-year-olds. But hey, if you want to blow $5 or $10 on a chocolate bar, be my guest. I save my $s for books.
