Somewhere in the last two years, a number of very large confectionery companies quietly stopped calling their chocolate chocolate. Nobody announced it. The packets simply began to say chocolate candy, or chocolatey, which is a word that means a product is in the general vicinity of chocolate without being obliged to arrive.
The mechanism is dull and entirely legal. Cocoa butter is the most expensive thing to come out of a cocoa bean. Take it out, put in palm or shea fat instead, and you have what the trade calls a compound coating. It looks the same on the shelf. It costs considerably less. What it can no longer do is call itself chocolate, because in most jurisdictions that word is a legal description with numbers attached to it rather than a matter of opinion.
Why they did it
It would be satisfying to file this under corporate cynicism, but the arithmetic was genuinely brutal. Cocoa peaked somewhere north of $10,000 a tonne in late 2024 and early 2025, four or five times what the industry had budgeted for a decade. When your single largest input quadruples, you can raise your price, shrink your bar, or change your recipe. Most large manufacturers did some combination of all three, and the third one was the least visible. That was rather the appeal.
So the swap happened at the edges of the range first. Seasonal shapes. Miniatures. The products nobody scrutinises because they arrive by the bagful.
Why they stopped
People noticed. Specifically, one of the people who noticed was the grandson of the man whose name is on the packet. Brad Reese, descendant of H. B. Reese, wrote a letter of complaint about compound coatings, published it on LinkedIn, and watched it travel further than any advertisement Hershey ran that quarter. A great many ordinary customers had already been saying the same thing in less articulate terms: it does not taste the way it used to.
In the spring, Hershey's chief executive confirmed the company would move its classic brands back to proper milk and dark chocolate, with the transition finishing by 2027. The company was at pains to point out that the affected lines amounted to less than three per cent of the Reese's range. This is probably true, and it rather makes the point. The saving was marginal. The damage was not.
Cocoa, meanwhile, has come down. It has traded somewhere in the region of $5,500 to $6,000 a tonne this month, which is still expensive by any historical standard but roughly half the panic. The commercial case for taking the cocoa butter out has weakened almost as fast as it appeared.
The small print is worth reading
British rules are stricter than most on this. Chocolate sold here may contain up to five per cent vegetable fat other than cocoa butter, and if it does, the packet must say so, conspicuously and legibly: contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter. It is one line, usually near the ingredients, and almost nobody reads it. It tells you more about what you are holding than the front of the box does.
There is also a reason beyond principle to care. Cocoa butter melts at just under body temperature, which is why good chocolate collapses on the tongue rather than being chewed. Palm and shea fats melt higher. They sit there. Whatever else compound coating is, it is a slower, waxier experience, and no amount of labelling adjusts that.
We have never had this particular decision to make, which is less a virtue than a consequence of scale; when you make a few thousand bars rather than a few hundred million, the temptation is smaller and so is the saving. Still, the position is the same either way. The only fat in our chocolate is the one that came out of the bean.