'I took two bites and had to spit it out': candy makers are phasing out real cocoa in chocolate [View all]

The Unwrapped Peanut Butter Creme Mini Hearts proved to be a disappointment. “I took two bites and I had to spit it out,” Reese says. “I’ve never had that happen to me, ever, in the 70 years of my life. There was no taste. It was inedible.”

Reese took a closer look at the packaging, specifically the ingredients. He noticed that instead of milk chocolate, the mini hearts were covered in a chocolate-flavored coating that was mostly sugar and vegetable oil; the list of ingredients contained a disclaimer that the candy contained less than 2% cocoa. He visited the candy aisle at a nearby supermarket to investigate further and found that several other Reese’s and Hershey products, including Take 5, Mr Goodbar, and Heath bars, also lacked milk chocolate.

Cocoa, obviously, is the central ingredient in chocolate. It’s a complex food that, on its own, tastes almost bitter. Since humans began eating it, they’ve combined it with other ingredients, such as cinnamon and chilis, to make it more palatable. Hershey, Reese’s, and other commercial chocolate companies use sugar, milk and oil. For Reese, the extras had finally overshadowed the bittersweetness of the cocoa.

The volatile cocoa market is, in fact, a major factor in chocolate pricing. Since 2020, the climate crisis has led to a cycle of droughts and floods in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which, combined, produce 70% of the world’s chocolate. This led to diseases that destroyed the cocoa plantations and decimated the cocoa supply, says Alexis Villacis, an economist at the Ohio State University who studies the chocolate industry. (Like Reese, Villacis comes from a chocolate family: his grandparents were cocoa farmers in Ecuador.)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/11/reeses-hersey-chocolate-candy-cocoa