Like many people contemplating the line between middle-aged and old, I believe that many things have gotten worse since the golden days of my childhood. As Halloween approaches, my attention has naturally turned to candy.
Come Saturday, I will buy a bag or two of candy. Most of it will be eaten not by our sparse trick-or-treaters but by me, and so the stash must include my favorite: the miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. With equal parts guilt and greed, I will eat the precious morsels out of the freezer for days, tasting bliss and disappointment with every bite.
Bliss because it is hard to go wrong with peanut butter and chocolate. Disappointment because they will not evoke the heedless joy of my youth. For one thing, I worry about my sugar levels. For another, they just don’t taste as good as they did when I was gobbling them out of a plastic carrier shaped like a pumpkin.
Have my tastes grown more sophisticated, or have they dulled? Or has the candy changed? I’d prefer to believe the fault lies in my snack-sized treats, not myself. And earlier this year Brad Reese, grandson of the Reese’s founder, supported my case. His open letter blasted Hershey (which bought Reese’s in 1963) for degrading the quality of a once-proud product that has been “rewritten by formulation decisions that replace Milk Chocolate with compound coatings and Peanut Butter with peanut-butter-style crèmes.”
It’s hard to imagine a more dismal phrase than “peanut-butter-style.” True, the company might insist that this abomination appeared only in some of its more novel products, not the iconic cups, but consumers weren’t reassured. “Overnight,” wrote the food site Delish in April, “the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup went from a nationally beloved candy to the poster child for corporate [expletive].” Shortly thereafter, Hershey announced it would return all of Reese’s products to their classic recipes.
That might have been the end of it if New York Magazine’s Rachel Handler hadn’t decided to investigate further. She delved into the confectionary-industrial complex and reached a few conclusions. First, even the original Reese’s recipe has changed over time. Second, when she got a food lab to re-create versions from various eras, she found that the Reese’s of my childhood was probably the most “luxe,” while “the 2026 version was artificially sweeter, almost cloyingly so, and waxier,” with a “chemical aftertaste.” But her article also hints at reasons for this beyond — as many readers probably suspect — mere corporate greed.
I’m not saying corporations aren’t greedy, because they are. But greed can’t explain why food producers change their recipes; corporations were just as greedy in 1928, when the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup was invented. They were greedy in 1978, when I was cramming their product into my 5-year-old mouth. Greed is a constant, like the speed of light. It can’t explain why candy formulas have changed, or why candy bars have shrunk, to the frustration of many consumers who feel they’re being cheated out of their full chocolate fix.
So why do companies shrink the product, cheap out on ingredients and stuff our candy with preservatives? One answer is that they can: Food technology has created possibilities that didn’t exist in 1928. But the other answer is that we kind of want them to.
Now, I know you don’t want a tiny, artificial-tasting substitute — you want a full-size, full-chocolate experience, full of natural ingredients. We all want lots of things, from world peace to sporty convertibles. Often, we aren’t willing to pay for what we want.
When cocoa prices skyrocketed between 2022 and 2024, did we want to pay significantly more for a bar of chocolate? Maybe you would, but odds are you’re an affluent professional for whom candy bars are a rare indulgence, so a price spike may not matter much. For many consumers, it matters a lot.
Think about preservatives and stabilizers. They certainly sound awful — who wants their candy embalmed? No one. But who wants a stale Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? No one. If it’s a choice between that and the preservatives, well…
We could rejigger our modern supply chains, delivering fresh food more frequently instead of engineering it for eternity. But this would make food more expensive — and, as our inflationary era keeps demonstrating, that would anger a lot of people.
Corporations have to juggle trade-offs we’d rather not think about. They often make choices I wouldn’t, but I am not the average consumer. Companies have to guess whether that average consumer would rather have a more expensive chocolate bar or one that is smaller, cheaper to make and designed for a longer shelf life. They apparently reckon most of us hate sticker shock more than the gradual degradation of our favorite products.
You can argue that this is irrational, but many human emotions are, including nostalgia. You can also argue that the companies are guessing wrong (and in this case, Hershey seems to agree). Either way, you’re not arguing against corporate greed. You’re arguing against human fallibility. Alas, that too is a constant.
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