Candy companies are changing their recipes.
Climate change is affecting cocoa production and leading to higher prices and scarcity. That, in turn, has the candy industry redoing its recipes to try to minimize the use of cocoa and cocoa butter and use alternative ingredients without messing too much with the taste.
And that’s something that is now prompting them to quietly change the labeling of their candies as well.
For example, you may not have noticed, but the labels of Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar, and other candies have been suddenly changed in recent years. Gone are the words “milk chocolate,” replaced with the largely meaningless phrase “chocolate candy.”
So, what’s up with that? The Food and Drug Administration has very clear criteria for what constitutes milk chocolate, and the chocolate industry ran afoul of that. When grappling with their high cocoa costs, they started replacing expensive cocoa butter with other fats.
Now, that “reformulation,” as the industry calls it, means that you can no longer claim that a product has milk chocolate because it doesn’t meet the criteria. It’s not milk chocolate, and hence we get the largely ambiguous phrase “chocolate candy” replacing that.
Some are already using the phrase “chocolatey,” which suggests that it is in the vicinity of chocolate, but it’s not the same thing. Now we can see why this is happening, and it’s not going to be changing anytime soon. But make no mistake, this is not your father’s Almond Joy. This is something else entirely.
The post Why your favorite candy bar no longer has ‘milk chocolate’ appeared first on KTLA.
