CANDY BARS THAT BETRAYED US

We all have that one candy bar from or childhood that we remember so vividly. My question is what changed, our memory, or the ingredients?

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Good morning. It's June the first, two thousand twenty-six, and straight from the Highly Cavanated studio. This is According to Willie B, and I will be your host for the next half hour, or give or take a minute or two. So, you know, something weird happened the other day, and I wanted to share it with you. And I thought, you know, what a great podcast subject. And I have a feeling that I'm gonna gain some friends over this one, and I hope that I do because I hope that I spark some moments of nostalgia for you uh through what I'm about to bring up. So the other day I had a sweet tooth that was acting up and thought, you know what? I want to go get me just a regular candy bar. Now, I'm not one to really go get a lot of candy bars. I'm just it's just not my thing. They don't taste the way they did when I was a kid, and so it's it's kind of like soda. Like I don't even drink soda anymore because Fantagrape, uh knee high grape, all the strawberry, all these sodas, they don't taste like they did when I was a kid. And maybe that's just my own memory being skewed. I don't know, but they don't taste the same. And I think we, if we're honest with ourselves, we know why, because they're replacing ingredients with like high fructose corn syrup, especially stuff like this, that they didn't have back in, let's call it the late 70s, early 80s. Uh, and or they weren't widely used, let's put it that way. So, one of my favorite candy bars growing up, believe it or not, is kind of an oddball. So, what does that say about me? Because they say, Well, you are what you eat. So, I guess my candy bar is an oddball. I guess that makes me an oddball. Uh, the jury's still out on that one. So, you know, sometimes a candy bar is just a candy bar, and sometimes it's a time machine. Because the other day when I was standing looking at the candy rack, and I saw something that took me right back to being a kid, and that candy bar is a zero bar. And for those of you that grew up loving zero bars, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And for those of the you don't, it's white chocolate uh over an uh almond nougat. And to me, it was just one of the and I and uh here's the crazy part I'm not a fan of white chocolate at all, but for the zero bar, it was something about that white chocolate and combined with that almond nougat that just set it apart, it just made it unique. So I thought, oh, I remember those so well, so vividly, I could just taste it before I ever bought it. So I went ahead, I bought one, I opened it up, and I took a bite and immediately thought, wait a minute, something's different. Now, like I said, maybe it's nostalgia, but maybe it's memory, maybe it's age, or maybe they change the candy bar. And that got me wondering do candy companies really think that we don't notice? And for that matter, any food manufacturer, do they really think that we don't notice when they change and what I like to use the word cheap out on ingredients versus change? You know, to me, and I get that change is not always for the best, but usually it's like, okay, we're gonna change this ingredient. Okay, well, so are you making it better? No, we're just cheaping out, and so tonight we're gonna talk about candy bars and childhood memories and cocoa butter, corporate decisions, and whether the candy we grew up with is still the candy that we're buying today, because what you're about to find out is it's not. Because I remember the candy bar of our childhood and walking into convenience stores, drug stores, gas stations, pocket chains, Saturday afternoons, summer vacations, all of these. I remember when I was a teenager, you could walk around the neighborhood and pick up an empty soda bottle, and there was usually a deposit. So you could pick up three or four or five soda bottles, glass bottles, and take them to this little convenience store on the corner, and you would get 40, 50 cents, 60 cents, 75 cents back, and that was enough to buy a candy bar. And so that was our childhood business model, if you will, because it allowed us to kind of go out and scavenge and and basically go on a wild scavenge hunt and find these glass bottles to get the extra money we needed to go and get a candy bar or a soda or another soda or whatever the case was. So that has disappeared off of the landscape today that kids kids don't know that same feeling of going picking up three or four uh deposit bottles and and going and getting some change. Enough to do you know how many bottles you would have to pick up now to buy a $2.50 candy bar? I mean, and I could just see with inflation that they would basically the candy bar went up and the deposit on a bottle would go down. So again, you would probably have to take in a whole case of bottles. I could just see that happening. You know, there was also pocket change. If we found a quarter in a payphone in the little change slot, or I mean, we got very creative as kids back in the late 70s, early 80s that we could find uh pocket change. I mean, we just had our ways of finding them, uh, picking up aluminum cans. Um, so there were there were ways to do that. That's how we spent our Saturday afternoons. Uh, you know, so I guess my question for you is, you know, what was your favorite candy bar? I'd I'd love to hear. Well, baby Ruth, Snickers, Milky Way, a Clark Bar. That was never my thing. A Butterfinger, which by the way, we all know that uh that company has left us all high and dry with the amount of changes that they did on that particular candy bar. I mean, they cheaped out on the chocolate, they took out the cornflakes out of there that gave it that unique crisp uh texture. And that's what they these manufacturers don't understand is like it's one thing for you to change the chocolate and you take out the cocoa butter, and we're going to talk about that in a minute, but you you take out the cocoa butter, but now the chocolate doesn't taste like chocolate anymore, it tastes like a candle experiment out of wicks and sticks. So, you know, and then you change the other ingredients and you take out the molasses and you put in high fructose corn syrup, and the list just keeps growing and growing. So let's talk about this for a minute. So, this whole cocoa butter thing, yes, cocoa butter changed. They the the price tripled back in the 70s, it was four thousand dollars a ton, now it's twelve thousand dollars a ton, and it's hard, it's getting harder to get because they had some bad weather uh years and etc, etc. So, just like any other agricultural crop, weather affects it. So there were reasons for the candy companies to look at finding alternatives. But here, in my opinion, and like I said, this is an opinion-based podcast, but this is my opinion. So they said, okay, well, you know what? They they didn't notice that we changed the chocolate, so let's change some other stuff and make even more profit. And look, I I will tell you right up front, I do not have a problem. That is the why we live in the US, is we are all about for a company to make money. I you know, but there comes a point of if you're going to charge me for something and you keep going up on the price and cheaping out on the ingredients. Okay, so now you want me to pay more for a product that I'm getting less and getting cheaper ingredients. Somewhere there has to be a balance there. You know, I did the math on the ingredients in an average chocolate bar and what it would have what it would cost if you took a candy bar today. Any case, let's just call, let's just say Mr. Good Bar. Remember that classic? It was simple chocolate and peanuts. I mean, how can you mess that up? Well, there's a lot of ways. When you took the cocoa butter out of the chocolate, it's not chocolate anymore. If you look up how to make chocolate, you'll see when you take out the cocoa butter, uh it's just you don't have the same product. I'm sorry. But when you so the same candy bar that now cost me $2.50, if you did put the cocoa butter back, you're telling me that that candy bar would be five dollars. Well, you know what? Fine, maybe maybe give us the the the American people, maybe give us that choice. Maybe I don't eat as many candy bars anymore, but hey, at least the one that I get was worth having. Um, if I told you that if if you were dead set, if you were like me and you were a meat and potatoes guy, and I said, okay, in front of you are two hamburgers. One of them is made completely of soy, and the other one is made of beef. Now, the one with soy is only a dollar, the one with beef is five dollars. Which one are you going to eat? Exactly. Nine times out of ten, or even ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you're gonna eat the beef burger, not that cheap soy patty. But here's the thing: you didn't just stop there, and that's what frustrates us as consumers. You take the zero bar. So let's talk about this. When you when I took that first bite, I knew there was something different. I mean, it was just I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but I knew it was something different. And here's the funny thing most people can't tell you the science, most people can't tell you the ingredients, but they know when something they love changes, and guess what they did? They added caramel. Um what what where'd that come from? Why? Why did you put that in there? And yet you look at baby Ruth over here in the back of the room, uh, acting all innocent and everything. No, Babe Ruth bar, uh, now it has less caramel. Did the people at Babe Ruth, did they take some of the caramel from that bar and put it in the zero bar? No, leave it alone. Just all that's just what I'm gonna say there. So let's follow the cocoa butter, and this is where the research comes in. Cocoa prices soaring, cocoa butter costs tripling, manufacturers looking for alternatives. I mean, their backs against the wall. It's like, hey, if we're gonna stay in business, we've got to find an alternative. So they went with most of the time, it's palm kernel oil, which by definition is not the most horrible thing on the planet, and it's also not the most horrible thing that is substituted into our foods nowadays as an alternative fat source, but it's also it does have links to high cholesterol and it does have links to uh heart disease. So are we trading our health for more profit? But one thing that I would ask is if cocoa butter made the candy bar taste better, why would a company stop using it? The answer is simple cost, and business is business. I understand that, you understand that. But consumers understand something else too. When the quality goes down, we notice. Now, in today's busy society, we may not all send letters and emails to the big manuf chocolate manufacturers and going, you change my candy bar, and and I won't stand for it. Now, some people do, as a matter of fact, when Butterfinger uh changed the quality of their candy bar, they got a lashing from a lot of people. Uh and the actual internet claims it as just shy of being a civil war because people were so mad. Because Butterfinger bar was is and still is today one of those iconic chocolate bars of the past. It was just it was unique, uh, just like a zero bar. I I felt cheated when I bought that zero bar. It was as if the manufacturer had been standing outside of the store after I took that bite, I would have been like, you know what, you can have this back. This is horrible. You changed something that I grew up with, you changed something that was really good and unique. And here's the thing: if you want to add caramel, add caramel. But here's the thing: don't call it a zero bar and then expect me to go into a store and buy the bar, and then I get disappointed after the first bite. If you want to add caramel, fine. Here's what you do you develop a new wrapper and you say, Hey, zero now with caramel, or zero plus one. I don't care what you call it, but just make it a different make another candy bar. Don't mess with what already works. But I'm gonna tell you, it wasn't just the chocolate, it's one of the you know, it's one of the most disappointing things because it's it's less caramel, it's caramel added, it's more fillers, it's smaller portions, it's different textures. Whole, yeah, because I remember the last time I bought a Fifth Avenue bar, it used to have that hand decorated look to it. Now I know it came down assembly an assembly line with the little machine spray nozzles going back and forth. I know that there's not somebody back there online making them by hand, but it still had that unique texture, it had that unique taste, and guess what? It was the most disappointing thing that I had bitten into in I don't know how long. Uh, or at least up until um, you know, I got the um the zero bar, because that was a huge disappointment. And you know, we tend to think shrinkflation is about size, but what if the bigger story is what's happening inside the wrapper? Because sometimes the candy bar gets smaller, cheaper to make, and more expensive to buy. And are you ready for this all at the same time? I mean, come on. If the candy bar from your childhood cost five dollars today, would you still buy it? If it was made exactly the same exact way that it was in 19, just pick a year, 1977, if it was made exactly the same, same exact ingredients, sourced from the exact same spots, nothing was changed, no wrapper change, nothing. Would you pay five dollars for it? Would you even buy it, or would you buy less? Or would you rather pay two dollars or two fifty for the version that we have now? Because see, that's actually a fascinating conversation because many people say they want quality, but are they willing to pay for it? Now let's talk about the cocoa butter supplies improving because ah, they did when they all the candy companies got together and they just started cutting out that cocoa butter left and right. Guess what? Now they have a better supply so it they can meet the supply and demand. Prices have laxed up because there's less demand for it. Commodity prices easing. Some manufacturers, a few, uh hear me when I say a few, and even the ones that are big into the candy companies, uh, candy manufacturing, they're not talking about changing all of their candy bars, just the ones that are their, let's call it the bread and cocoa butter of their operation. But now let's ask the questions. If consumers couldn't tell the difference, why are companies even talking about bringing it back? I'll tell you why. Because they know. What do they know? They know that we know that they changed. They know that we know they cheapened out on us. It's almost got to be a tongue twister there. So let's look at this. Maybe this episode was never really about candy bars. Maybe it was about memories. Maybe it was about noticing small changes, and maybe, just maybe, it was about realizing that sometimes companies change things one ingredient at a time and hope nobody notices. But here's the thing: we do notice. Maybe we don't know the science, and maybe we don't know the manufacturing process. Maybe we couldn't even identify if cocoa butter in a blind taste test or if they slathered it on our foreheads. But what we do know is what we remember. And for those that grew up with a favorite candy bar in one hand and a cold drink in the other, we remember exactly how it made us feel. And maybe that's the ingredient they're still trying to figure out how to replace. I wish them good luck with that. Thank you for spending a little time with me tonight. And until next time, don't forget to keep traveling, keep exploring, keep making memories, and caffeinate and conquer, of course. But one day, those memories become the stories. And according and according to Willie B, those stories are worth holding on to. Now go get a candy bar. Have a great day. Thank you for listening. Bye bye.