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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/25/cadbur...
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.
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 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.
Hersheys and other candy bars are like fast food- ubiquitous but far, far away from being our only or best options.
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.
If you have a chance to try Fazer chocolate then try it (sometimes stylized as Karl Fazer).
Will check though, I'm visiting Scotland next weekend. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.