On a recent afternoon, somewhere near the tail end of the American empire, I went to the movies. On a whim, I bought a box of Sno-Caps; they’d been my favorite movie candy as a kid. I mindlessly ate at least 19 of the semisweet-chocolate nonpareils until I realized I could barely taste them. What I did taste was somehow both neutral and vaguely unappetizing, like I was chewing on shaved-off pieces of a plain bar of soap. I internalized the problem and blamed myself. Maybe my tongue’s physical properties had changed and it was no longer a reliable source. Or my childhood memories, blurred by nostalgia and brain damage from drugs and the internet, were not to be trusted. Sno-Caps had probably never tasted like chocolate but always like soap. Regardless, it was my fault and not the fault of a multinational conglomerate that had my best interests at heart and would never betray me.
I forgot about the experience, a fleeting and common one in our era, until this past Valentine’s Day, when a 71-year-old man named Brad Reese — previously unknown to me but with whom I now regularly text — fired up LinkedIn from his one-bedroom condo in West Palm Beach, Florida. Reese is the proud grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H. B. Reese and an earnest and affable retiree who often wanders around wearing a bright-orange Reese’s T-shirt, talking to people about his family’s much-beloved candy. He’s been doing this for years, despite the fact that he does not work for the brand and never has. (Hershey bought it in 1963.) On that February 14 morning, Reese opened a bag of Reese’s Mini-Hearts, a seasonal variant of the product, and found them “inedible.” He threw them out, then posted a scathing open letter to Todd Scott, manager of corporate brand and editorial at Hershey, accusing Hershey of unforgivably altering many of Reese’s products by replacing real chocolate with compound chocolate — basically using vegetable oils instead of cocoa butter to lower costs and replacing real peanut butter with “peanut-butter-style crèmes” (also using vegetable oil).
Reese’s in Pieces
Others weighed in to share similar horror stories. “As a 61 yr old consumer who has eaten Reese’s as long as I can remember,” wrote one man, “I knew it wasn’t the same. Everyone said oh your taste buds have changed nope, the candy changed.” In every LinkedIn shitposter’s fantasy come to life, the missive escaped containment, getting picked up by everyone from Stephen Colbert to the New York Post. The Post shared texts from one of Reese’s furious and baffled relatives, many of whom were apparently still living quite comfortably off the Hershey’s sale. “Brad, this is your cousin Becky. You have created a nightmare for our family and the company,” wrote one. “It’s embarrassing to the entire Reese clan. Please stop!”
Four days after Reese’s first post, Hershey claimed (sort of) that its original peanut-butter-cup recipe had not changed but also (sort of) admitted to other recipe “adjustments” across the brand. (Like some other companies, Hershey often uses less-expensive vegetable fats in its seasonal editions, which are only briefly in demand when released around holidays like Halloween.) By April, videos depicting people bending heated Hershey chocolate bars like rubber were appearing on TikTok. That month, at an investor presentation, Hershey promised to pivot everything it makes with compound back to its old formulas by 2027.
But Reese was becoming increasingly suspicious that it was not just the seasonal products and that the original Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups had changed — despite Hershey insisting it hadn’t made any tweaks to that particular formula or to any of its classic recipes. Scanning the checkout aisle at his local Publix, he noticed other Hershey’s products had changed, many over the past few years, as confirmed by a New York Times article published in October 2025: Mr. Goodbar, Rolo, Almond Joy. He had more smoking guns in his inbox, he told me, but he hadn’t had time to sort through them all. Reese lives what he describes as a “simple life” in Century Village, a retirement community for people 55 and up. He’s had non-Hodgkins lymphoma for over 15 years and tells me he should have died several times, so he spends his days exactly how he likes. “I take naps in the morning, naps in the afternoon. This is mad crazy for me,” he said. He was going to a karaoke bar later. “I’m trying to get a handle on it, but I’m not going to ruin my very perfect life.”
I, however, was willing to ruin mine. Reese wasn’t alone in feeling like everything was getting worse and we were all powerless to do anything but roll over, accept it, and eventually die, probably from eating something we thought tasted weird but were assured did not. Everyone in my life I spoke to agreed that something was amiss, that Reese’s — and commercial chocolate in general — didn’t taste the way it used to. Plus everything from Smartfood popcorn to HVAC to mattresses to car-door handles sucked now. Why wouldn’t Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, whose entire reason for being was to taste good, also suck? And why was it so hard to know how — and why — they tasted worse?
I would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for. I entered a terrifying fun house of American enshittification. I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow.
Illustration: Bruno Zocca
As a person who previously had no idea that there was even a question as to whether chocolate was actually chocolate, I had to go back to the basics. Chocolate, both a tangible, edible entity and a nebulous idea that has tormented men in varying positions of power (and now me) for centuries, is made from cocoa beans. The beans are roasted and ground into a paste called chocolate liquor. The liquor is then combined with things like milk and sugar and vanilla to make what we universally recognize as commercial chocolate. If a company wants to label something as chocolate in the U.S., it has to align with the FDA’s standard of identity for chocolate, meaning it must contain certain ingredients and not others. Since 1944, the FDA has defined it across several categories. Milk chocolate must contain at least 10 percent chocolate liquor, 12 percent total milk solids, and 3.39 percent milk fat. Bittersweet chocolate requires at least 35 percent chocolate liquor.
Compound, however, is what you get when cocoa butter is extracted from the cocoa paste (and saved for other uses) and replaced with a vegetable oil. Adding any amount of non-cocoa-butter fat means the product can no longer be labeled chocolate in the U.S. And here’s the compound tell: Instead of “chocolate” or “milk chocolate,” it’s referred to as “chocolate-y” or “chocolate candy” or “chocolate coating,” which is the sort of underhanded thing consumers would never know to look for or notice unless, like me or Brad Reese, they were becoming increasingly paranoid.
Standards for chocolate vary around the world, and we have some of the strictest here — in Europe and the U.K., you can use 5 percent non-cocoa-butter fats and still call it chocolate. When Europe established this standard in 2003, it caused a stir among American chocolatiers who then had a lobby known as the Chocolate Manufacturers Association. Some of them wanted to similarly change the rules here to allow for vegetable fats in chocolate, while others vehemently opposed the idea. The members couldn’t agree on what to do, so they made a gentlemen’s agreement, as one of them put it, to let the whole thing go.
Everything was fine until 2007, when Hershey, along with several other industry groups, did in fact lobby the FDA to change the standard. They did so under the banner of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, perhaps so some of the chocolatiers wouldn’t know what was happening until it was already underway. Hershey’s then-spokesman Kirk Saville defended the choice, telling Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News that “there are high-quality oils available which are equal to or better than cocoa butter.”
Shortly after, the chocolatier Gary Guittard began a countercampaign called “Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate.” Guittard, 80, is the owner of Guittard Chocolate Company, the oldest continuously family-owned-and-operated chocolate company in the U.S., running since 1868. Guittard the company is both a chocolate supplier for other brands and makes the delicious chocolate chips my family has eaten by the handful straight from the freezer all my life. When Guittard was designing his chips, he says, he ground his chocolate into smaller particles than most companies like to (the smaller the particle, the more cocoa butter you need to cover it) to make a smoother, more decadent chocolate. “I just think people in this country want whole foods that aren’t engineered,” said Guittard, who has the calm, benevolent manner you might expect of someone who “almost single-handedly” saved the industry’s standards, as Reese put it.
The chocolate-eating public took notice of Guittard’s campaign and sent letters to the FDA in protest. His movement defeated the measure. “Chocolate lovers need not be alarmed about the future of their favorite product,” the FDA stated at the time. “Cacao fat, as one of the signature characteristics of the product, will remain a principal component of standardized chocolate.” (How strictly it enforces that standard is another question — an ex-lobbyist told me the FDA doesn’t have time to worry about things like this because people are dying all the time from contaminated spinach and onions.)
Compound is not inherently bad — it makes sense in certain applications, like the hard chocolate shell that covers ice cream, often made with a coconut oil that melts more slowly than cocoa butter. And it’s standard, across all industries involving things humans put into their mouths, to tweak ingredients over time in hopes of saving money or dodging supply-chain issues. Ellia Kassoff recalled what happened when his family’s legacy brand, Leaf — which made candies including Jolly Ranchers, Whoppers, and Heath bars — was acquired by Hershey in 1996.
“As a kid, I used to have tons of Whoppers, and they always had a great crunch. When Hershey bought the product, the first thing I noticed was every third or fifth one, there was no crunch,” he told me. “It was a deflated, gooey mess inside. What I found out later from people in R&D is that if you don’t have a high-quality chocolate that covers the malt ball itself, air will get in and it will deflate your Whopper.” Whoppers’ current ingredient label does not even mention chocolate, but it does have palm-kernel oil. The candy is also made with something called confectioner’s glaze, an insect-derived shellac sometimes known as beetlejuice. I thought of Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer — ostensibly an allegory — in which it’s revealed that the bars supplied as sustenance to the back-of-the-train plebeian class are made from dead cockroaches.
Chocolate execs have often blamed what they call “innovations” or “reformulations” on the rising cost of cocoa. And cocoa has reached record prices over the past few years, hitting a high in 2024, in part owing to things like climate change, Trump’s tariffs, and crop instability in the regions where it’s grown, including West Africa and South America. (Prices went back down but have been climbing again in recent months.) It’s often grown via child labor, and in some cases slavery, or by exploiting already vulnerable farmers who take on much of the risk but don’t see increased profits when prices go up. “What we’re seeing is the high cost of cheap chocolate,” said Clay Gordon, a professional chocolate critic who runs a website called TheChocolateLife where he takes the industry to task on a regular basis. He told me about something called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, a 2001 agreement in which big chocolate committed to eliminating “the worst forms of child labor” in chocolate-making. It was meant to be resolved by 2005. If you’ve ever paid attention to other self-regulations of big industry, you already know it was not. In a 2019 story on child labor in cocoa farming, the Washington Post reported that roughly two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from West Africa, where more than 2 million children were engaged in “dangerous labor.” All the Harkin-Engel Protocol did was allow “big chocolate to monitor themselves, the fox guarding the henhouse,” said Gordon.
Jason Liebig, a brand historian with one of the world’s largest candy-wrapper collections, said that if I was going to pick a bone with anything, it should be with consumer purchasing behavior and the way distribution channels have shifted to meet it. To get onto Amazon storefronts, or into the big-box stores like Walmart, products must be able to stay shelf stable, survive in hot trucks, and sit in distribution centers much longer than natural ingredients could. “Sometimes they have to sit in warehouses for six months before they even get into stores,” Liebig said. To make sure their products survive these conditions, many processed-food brands stuff them full of preservatives and emulsifiers, like TBHQ (tertiary butylhydroquinone), a chemical compound in some of Hershey’s products that’s banned in Japan and at Whole Foods and has been linked to a number of health issues in lab animals. Or PGPR (polyglycerol polyricinoleate), an emulsifier and stabilizer that similarly extends shelf life, smooths texture, and allows manufacturers to use less chocolate in their candy (One chocolatier, Konstantin Zsigo, suggested PGPR might be one explanation for the uncanny bendability of the Hershey bar — though Hershey denies that the bar was doing anything out of the ordinary).
“I’ve rarely interacted with anyone I think is an evil person in the candy business,” Liebig said. “They don’t see themselves as being in the candy business. They see themselves as being in the joy business.” This was a sentiment that came up frequently in my reporting, though Reese, Guittard, and other critics thought it was more complicated than that. Where companies like Hershey used to be family owned or shepherded by people with a real stake in the product, they’re increasingly run by people who just like to be in charge of companies. Reese brought up Hershey’s current CEO, Kirk Tanner, by way of example — Tanner came to the company in August 2025 from Wendy’s, where he spent 18 months. “He doesn’t have a confectionary background,” Reese said. “It’s all about their compensation. These guys are literally taking down tens of millions of dollars in annual and bonus payments.” (Tanner made nearly $17 million as Hershey’s CEO in 2025, the equivalent of roughly 7,817,000 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from Publix.) Guittard says most of big chocolate don’t care much about quality. “They want less-expensive ingredients,” he said. As Rick Ross, the founder of Galerie Candy and not the rapper, sees it, so do we. “Consumers don’t want to pay more, and they want to enjoy the same thing for the same value, but the raw material cost, labor cost, energy costs, everything is going up,” he said.
But why did so many of us detect a difference in the beloved classics that Hershey claimed hadn’t changed since their inception? One person who, until recently, worked with Hershey told me his impression is that the company is constantly altering ingredients but only up to the threshold where it believes people would be able to tell the difference. Most of the time, consumers don’t notice. But sometimes, we do. And when we notice, we tend to get mad, even if the altered ingredients are allegedly “better” ones. Most companies don’t even care when people do notice a formula change. It’s only a problem when they stop buying something. (According to Hershey’s self-reported 2026 sales data, that hasn’t happened yet.)
There’s a thought experiment called Theseus’ paradox, referring to Plutarch’s story about a ship, carrying the Greek mythological hero of that name, whose pieces slowly rotted out over time. Men replaced each timber, one by one, as they decayed. At what point did the Ship of Theseus stop being the original ship, philosophers later wondered, and become an entirely different entity? It’s not unlike what Guittard called the “incremental degradation of chocolate” over the last 50 years. “You can’t tell when you change one thing,” Guittard said, “but then you do it again and, all of a sudden, you’ve got a different product from what you had in the beginning.”
By this point, I was eating a lot of chocolate — real and compound, cheap and luxurious — trying to see if I could train myself to detect various ingredients. I was becoming snobbier, and my chin was breaking out in painful cystic acne the likes of which I had never experienced. Maybe it was all the TBHQ, or maybe it was the hot-cortisol thrill-panic of knowing I was about to make a lifelong enemy of a multibillion-dollar corporation.
Illustration: Bruno Zocca
In early July, two days before America’s 250th birthday, I entered the molten belly of the chocolate beast: Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was 100 degrees outside. The world was melting and at the wrong rate, as if it were made with coconut oil. When I’d reached out to Todd Scott at the Hershey Company for an interview, he responded with a polite stonewalling. So I got as close as I could without risking imprisonment. Did the people in the town — locals, tourists, employees — notice anything amiss with the chocolate themselves?
The community of Hershey was founded by Milton Hershey in 1903, roughly a decade after he founded his chocolate company. As the story told at the Hershey Museum goes, chocolate had once been an indulgence for the elite. “For Mayans, it was spiritual nectar. For Europeans, it was an expensive luxury. For Americans, it became an everyday treat, thanks largely to Milton Hershey.” Hershey had purchased farmland in the middle of dairy country — he used the fresh milk from local cows to make the chocolate — and built his factory there, then surrounded it with homes and businesses and churches and schools for employees. The plan was, as Hershey biographer Michael D’Antonio puts it, to create “a perfect American town in a bucolic natural setting, where healthy, right-living, and well-paid workers lived in safe, happy homes.”
In November, all of this will be dramatized on the big screen when Angel Studios, a “faith based” film studio run by four Mormon brothers, releases Hershey, a Hershey-produced biopic about Milton and his valiant struggle to make chocolate for the masses. It’s a strange coincidence of timing — while controversy about the quality of ingredients and the dangers of corner-cutting threatens to destabilize Hershey, the company is putting out what is essentially propaganda about its founder’s maniacal obsession with these very things. The film has a hagiographic, unintentional 30 Rock energy. In nearly every scene, Milton, who nearly boarded the Titanic before canceling his ticket at the last minute, is shown making noble business decisions that baffle everyone around him as he single-mindedly fixates on perfecting his milk-chocolate formula, often to the detriment of his bottom line. The film unfolds at a haltingly unnatural pace with what appear to be green-screen driving backdrops and a script that was either written by AI or muddled into meaninglessness by hundreds of C-level sign-offs. “Milton, you keep chasing perfection,” says Alexandra Daddario, playing Hershey’s wife, Catherine, as she flirtily plops chocolate on Finn Wittrock’s nose. “When maybe you should be chasing magic.” Later, another character says to Milton, “We can get out of this jam if you would just consider lowering your wages.” He replies, “No! You don’t understand. This will be a factory town. The town supplies the factory. We expand the factory. The factory feeds the town.” For months, I’ve repeated this line under my breath as a sort of koan.
In Hershey, Milton is revered as something of a god, a flawless emblem of all that is good in the world. This is largely owed to the Milton Hershey School, which Milton and Catherine founded in 1909 as an orphanage for a highly specific demographic: poor, healthy, white male orphans. Over the years, it grew into a more formal boarding school and now accepts children of non-white-male-orphan experience. People in Hershey, and much of the Hershey branding canon, point to the school as an indicator of the benevolence of the company, the town, the man, the Hershey Trust, the theme park, the candy bars, the country club, and so on.
I kept an open mind about the right-living, perfect American town as I drove past Reese Avenue and checked into the Hershey Lodge, where I was immediately handed a Hershey bar. There is not a single missed opportunity for brand integration in Hershey. The streetlights across town are shaped like Hershey’s Kisses. The hotel hallways are pumped with a Hershey-ish scent, which smells more like something very sweet that’s a little bit on fire. My hotel room’s art was a Hershey bar drowned in a body of water, its corpse resting quietly on a bed of rocks. The soap is billed as “cocoa infused” but does not actually contain any cocoa. I showered quickly, slathered myself in non-cocoa-infused cocoa-infused lotion, ran terrified past the indoor water park, and approached an affable older male bellhop stationed outside the hotel.
He cheerfully told me he’d lived in the area since he was 5 and had retired from the job three times, but “they keep pulling me back in.” He likes working at the hotel because of “the people contact and the fact that the proceeds from your stay go to the Milton Hershey School.” I thought we were getting along well until I asked if he was familiar with what was going on in the news. “I don’t listen to the news,” he said before I could finish explaining Brad Reese’s crusade. “I listen to classic rock. If you have questions about classic rock, that’s something I could help you with. Enjoy your day!”
Sweating profusely, I got on the hotel’s free shuttle to Hersheypark. A child behind me screamed the entire ten-minute ride. I disembarked, the pavement beneath me audibly sizzling. Inside, between chugging water and standing in front of misting stations, I spoke to a group of 14-year-old girls on a church trip who all loved Reese’s and hadn’t noticed a change. A group of 14-year-old boys from a JCC camp mostly agreed, save for one dissenting tween. “I don’t like the bars. It tastes artificial,” he said. “I prefer any chocolate besides Hershey. It tasted better when I was younger.”
Mandy and Adam, a 30-something couple who come to the park every year for their anniversary, were huge Reese’s fans but had noticed a shift in the peanut-butter cups, including the original, over the past few years. “It used to be more milky, and the peanut butter was more prominent. It’s a little less flavor now,” said Mandy. “It’s not as smooth and velvety anymore,” said Adam. I spoke to several elderly couples, all of whom drove to the park multiple times a week to take advantage of the meal plan, which costs $149 per person for up to two meals per day — for the entire summer — from some of the park’s on-site fast-food vendors. “You can’t beat that,” said Leanne, who was sitting on a bench underneath a tree with her husband, Kurt, on a scooter, as they waited the requisite 180 minutes to get their second meal of the day. I asked if they regularly ate chocolate at the park. Leanne eyed me. “I’m gonna be honest,” she said. “I don’t like Hershey’s chocolate. I used to, but they changed it. It’s like they made it waxy.” Her grandkids ate it all the time because “the kids don’t know any different.” A teenage couple, Marco and Talon, told me they preferred gummies and Swedish candy to chocolate, which lined up with what some people told me about Gen Z turning away from chocolate as a whole, creating another crisis for the chocolate industry.
Inside a Christmas store on the premises, open year-round, an employee, whose siblings also work at the park, said they hadn’t personally noticed a change but that, among the staff, people “think it could be true.” “It would make sense,” the employee said. “It keeps production costs down, and the product costs the same.” A Nutcracker ornament suddenly fell off a hook and shattered on the floor. “That happens a lot,” the employee said. I asked if the store was haunted. “I think so,” they said.
As I left the park, I bought a pair of deep-fried Reese’s and ate one as a bluegrass cover of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” played over the speakers. I was unexpectedly moved by both the song and the fried chocolate, which was one of the best things I’d ever eaten in my life; I had to force myself to throw the second one away as I knew it would soon destroy my complexion. An employee smiled at me. “Have the sweetest day!” she said.
I continued to, in the most literal sense, at the adjacent Hershey’s Chocolate World, a gigantic retail shop. The store sells things like Reese’s whey protein, Jolly Rancher creatine, pickles dipped in Jolly Rancher syrup (“You don’t need to try those,” said one man who had just eaten one), and Hershey clogs. I took a free tour of the simulated on-site Hershey’s factory, an “It’s a Small World”–style ride focused on Hershey’s commitment to quality ingredients like cocoa and fresh milk. I put on a hairnet and an apron and paid $29.95 to “create your own candy bar” in a mini on-site lab. The chocolate tasted significantly better than that in a real Hershey’s — fresher, smoother — though there was no indication it was a different chocolate from what was used for the actual bar. I paid $22.50 for an experience called “Reese’s Stuff Your Cup,” in which you can stuff a two-pound Reese’s cup with things like chocolate chips or, cannibalistically, chopped Peanut Butter Cups. The peanut butter inside was delicious. I asked the employee stuffing my cup what it was made from, and she told me it was the “freshest in the world” because it came from the factory down the road and had “no preservatives in it,” unlike the real cups. I ate it straight from the shell with a fork for days. (In an email, a spokesperson for Hershey said “the cup butter sold at Chocolate World is the same as found in peanut butter cups sold at stores.” When asked if it included preservatives, they did not respond.)
The next day, it was again 100 degrees outside. I wandered the town beneath the blazing sun, looking for any reprieve as my phone overheated to the point of shutting down. I stepped into a clothing store where, just outside, the owner had displayed a dress hand-painted to depict the Hershey factory topped with two fluffy gray chiffon plumes of smoke. She told me she’d moved to Hershey with her husband and children a few years ago to be “house parents” at the school, an experience that had changed her life. She was not a fan of any chocolate, though she was trying to learn to like it. I walked over to a crêpe shop she recommended and ordered one made with chocolate and watched in astonishment as the owner of a crêpe shop in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Chocolate Avenue, pulled out a gigantic block of Barry Callebaut. “Hershey doesn’t provide a large enough bar,” he explained as he gently moved the bar back and forth over the crêpe, slowly melting it. The chocolate was difficult to obtain — he had to drive three hours to Jersey to get it — but he prefers the Callebaut anyway. The resulting crêpe was perfect, rich, just the right amount of sweet. “By everybody’s standards, it’s much better than Hershey,” he said.
Illustration: Bruno Zocca
Polling the average Hersheypark consumer had taught me a lot about individual taste preferences within the increasingly deteriorating conditions of the imperial core and about how hot I could get before I started to weep. But the results were unreliable from a scientific perspective. I needed professional help. In a Proustian turn, I found myself back in my parents’ house in my hometown of Chicago, trying to recall the peanut-butter cups of my youth. The onetime “candy capital of the world,” Chicago is still home to several chocolate companies, including Barry Callebaut. Mars closed its factory in 2024, but Mondelez has its global headquarters there, and MrBeast’s Feastables has an office in the city as well. Chicago’s frigid climate, which was uniquely positioned to kill my spirit, is good for chocolate-making. I was there to meet Beth Kimmerle, a chocolate and candy expert, historian, and food scientist who started out at the candy company Fannie May and now runs her own company called Attribute Analytics. She buys consumer-facing food brands off grocery-store shelves, runs in-house taste tests on them, compares that sensory data with real-time sales data, then sells the info back to brands to help them figure out why something is or isn’t selling well. “What sommeliers are for wine, we are for food,” she explained.
Kimmerle had offered to put together an in-depth taste test for me. With help from Liebig’s wrapper collection (which dates back to the early 1900s), her own knowledge of the industry, scrupulous research, conversations with people who had previously worked with Hershey, and the sensory data from her company, she was going to re-create different versions of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from over the years and see what her expert panel of taste-testers (and I) thought. Would we notice a difference? In the days leading up to our meeting, Snickers (owned by Mars) fired direct shots at Reese’s, releasing an ad for its new Snickers Peanut Butter line — tagline: “Made with real peanut butter” — that featured a focus group for the candy made up entirely of people named Reese. When I reached out to Mars to ask about the ad, representatives claimed it had been written and shot before Brad Reese’s campaign as a “creative way” to “insert Snickers into the cultural conversation.” Nonetheless, war had been declared.
Kimmerle, who works with a lot of major brands, was careful not to disparage anyone in particular but agreed that the confectionery industry was in a “quiet identity crisis.” She referred to the compound-chocolate situation as a “doozy” with “no easy answers.” She felt strongly that cocoa butter isn’t something you can remove from chocolate without incident — it’s a scientifically perfect ingredient as engineered by nature. “Cocoa butter melts at body temperature,” she explained, which gives chocolate its most “seductive” quality. “If a chocolate doesn’t melt and starts forming a ball in your mouth because they’re using some sort of oil, that’s not indulgent.” Reese’s, she said, is particularly dangerous to mess with because it “isn’t just a candy. It’s a perfect example of a perfect product. It’s salty, it’s sweet, it’s roasted. When you change one ingredient, everything can get out of tune.”
Kimmerle understood the pressures faced by Hershey but admired Reese “because he brought something to the surface. A lot of people perceived these changes,” she said. “You can’t gaslight someone’s mouth.” When asked, she said she and her panel had already perceived differences in the original peanut-butter cup. “There’s something about the flavor. Again, this is just me talking about my trained sensory panel, but it’s not melting the way it used to. The texture in the peanut butter might be off. Remember how it used to be — it wasn’t chunky, but it almost had a texture to it. I don’t want to say gritty, but it was not smooth. Whether that was designed or whether that was the equipment the Reese family had back in the 1930s, whatever — if you change one thing, you change everything in confections.”
Kimmerle told me there was a COVID loophole that might explain the difference we were experiencing in our gaslit mouths. “The FDA issued a reprieve on ingredient decks in 2020 because food companies were considered ‘necessary,’” she said, meaning that, until late 2023, companies could make ingredient changes without having to reflect that on their packaging. “Ingredient decks only give you a small portion of the real story, which is a little-known truth.” Given an inch, some companies took a mile and had been flying under the radar ever since. “I’m not saying that companies necessarily took advantage of that,” she clarified. “I am saying there were companies that never made the updates or continued to make changes and maybe didn’t alert their regulatory team because they were like, ‘Who’s really noticing what’s happening on the ingredient deck?’” (The FDA says it evaluates “potential labeling violations on a case-by-case basis.”)
On a Wednesday morning, Kimmerle picked me up at my parents’ house and drove me to her office in the West Loop. On the way there, she told me about some classic chocolate scandals of yore, like the Mast Brothers, Brooklyn chocolate-makers who said they were “bean-to-bar guys” but were accused of melting and reusing other chocolate sources and “instantly lost status.” (The brothers denied many of the allegations.) When we arrived, she ushered me into her gigantic industrial kitchen and introduced me to her three college-age interns. They proudly revealed their re-created Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: The “OG” (1940s) and something she called “Brad’s Ideal,” a version meant to replicate the one from the ’60s and ’70s (coinciding with his childhood and a description I got from Reese of the cups he remembered and loved best). They’d also included a current version pulled from the shelves.
One of the interns had ordered Sweetgreen from DoorDash to offset the amount of chocolate we’d be eating. When it didn’t arrive, he left to investigate, then came back sweaty and out of sorts, explaining there had been some kind of salad-backup crisis. The line was so long and the salads so delayed and incorrectly made that the DoorDashers had given up and were sitting outside the restaurant eating customers’ orders with their bare hands. Only one of our salads had made it to the office, and the others were allegedly going to be delivered later by multiple DoorDashers. (They were not.) It felt like another illustration of how fully we had lost the plot as a species.
Anyway, it was time to taste peanut-butter cups. Kimmerle showed me Liebig’s wrappers from the 1940s till now, where there were, in fact, visible ingredient changes alongside the constants (milk chocolate, peanut butter, sugar, salt). The order in which they were listed shifted over time. Since the ’70s, this has indicated a change in quantity — the higher an ingredient is on the list, the more of it is inside the package. The OG had been made with pre-commercialized peanut butter, so it had soy flour, possibly to offset the oil from the peanuts. By the ’60s, the manufacturer had added the sweetener dextrose. By the ’80s, TBHQ (which is banned in the shared kitchen Kimmerle’s company uses and was not used in our tests) and citric acid for freshness, and by 2006, PGPR. Kimmerle raised her eyebrows suggestively when I asked why Reese’s might need PGPR. Cocoa butter is more stable than vegetable oils, so theoretically it needs fewer stabilizers like PGPR. Were there secret vegetable oils inside the peanut-butter cups?
The Hershey’s bar on shelvesnow has also changed since its inception, even though Hershey’s says it hasnot — where it used to be made with chocolate liquor, sugar, cocoa butter, and condensed milk, the company has added milk fat,soy lecithin, PGPR, and “natural flavors” to the ingredient label. “People that used to work with Hershey’s, and no longer do, werethe only people that could confirm this has changed,” Kimmerle said. She added that “Hershey used to produce its own chocolate.Now it’s sometimes produced for them by others” in factories around the world, then incorporated into its hundreds of brands.In other words, it’s reformulations all the way down.
Wearing lab coats, the five of us stood in a cluster around the counter and evaluated the peanut-butter cups. For the OG re-creation, Kimmerle had used today’s Hershey’sbar, which has what she calls a “lactic sour” note due to the presence of butyric acid, which is also in vomit. (“That’s the reason why all your friends from Europe are like, ‘Hershey tastes like vomit,’” she said.) The OG’s texture was incredible — crumbly, almost sandy, owing to the soy flour. The ’60s–’70s version was the most luxe with the highest-quality milk chocolate. For this one, Kimmerle used a European brand doing “American-style chocolate” drag, which is sweeter than an American bar would be. She made the swap after speaking with someone who used to work with Hershey and who described how the brand’s chocolate was once made. Its peanut-butter taste was very well blended with the chocolate, rather than either sticking out as its own flavor. Kimmerle explained that this was the mark of a good confection. “It’s like you’re listening to a symphony versus a high-school band,” she said. Things devolved from there. The 2026 version was artificially sweeter, almost cloyingly so, and waxier, with more of the chemical aftertaste that Kimmerle calls “throat burn,” a sensation of something being stuck in the back of your throat (which can come from the addition of things like vegetable oils and artificial flavors).
Chocolate secreting from my pores, I lurched back to the office the next day, and we did the taste test again — this time blind. A few of Kimmerle’s employees joined us, including an extremely chill retired R&D guy named Dewey. Dewey told me how, over the course of his career, he saw that when money got tight, corporations often cut and outsourced R&D departments first, meaning there were fewer people doing quality control for consumer products. The industry no longer has anyone holding on to our cultural candy memories, no the Giver for chocolate who remembers how things used to be. There’s no real way to do an “apples to apples” test in terms of what any candy tasted like five or ten years ago, as Kimmerle put it.
We used Kimmerle’s proprietary tasting system to evaluate the cups for aroma and appearance and the taste and feel of things like “cooked dairy,” the aforementioned throat burn, salt, peanut, sugar, and artificial vanilla. Because I had seen and tasted all of the cups the previous day, I felt cocky about my ability to identify them in the “field.” I was wrong. I ate the 2026 Reese’s and assumed it was one of Kimmerle’s re-created OG formulations that I’d liked more the day before. I felt more confused than ever. Maybe we, the fickle consumer, were the problem.
My reaction reminded me of a story Kassoff, the Whoppers lover, had told me. In 2018, Ferrero acquired Butterfinger from Nestlé and reformulated the bar. Ferrero told me exactly what it had done: upgraded its cocoa quality, removed preservatives, increased the amount and size of peanuts, and removed hydrogenated fats from the coating — all changes that likely cost more and were better from a health perspective. Consumers were not happy (maybe we never will be?). My Sno-Caps experience was a similar situation. Ferrero owns the candy now and told me it hadn’t changed the formula since purchasing the brand in 2018. But in 2015, Nestlé USA announced it would remove all artificial colors and flavors from its chocolate, including Sno-Caps. I was guilty of the very hypocrisy I was studying. Perhaps our modern palates actually preferred enshittification?
Luckily, I was the only one fooled — after the taste test, Dewey, who said he hadn’t previously noticed any difference in the Reese’s, was taken aback by what he now perceived to be a major change in the cups’ taste over the years. The OG and ’60s versions “tasted like real peanut butter instead of a fake, dried-up peanut butter,” he said. We tasted a few other Reese’s products that the company openly says are made with compound, such as Take 5 and Reese’s Sticks. Contrasted with the re-created Reese’s cups of yore, they tasted plasticky, oily, not quite of this world.
After the taste tests, Kimmerle put together a spreadsheet of all of our responses to the various cups. The 2026 Reese’s came in the lowest in all categories, including “chocolate intensity,” “peanut intensity,” “sweet intensity,” “salt scale,” “off notes” (we noted artificial flavors), “flavor release” (moderate versus fast for the other versions), “blendedness” (a three versus four and five for the others), and “mouthfeel” (we detected throat burn). Its overall “sensory story” (“less peanut impact, more artificial notes”) had shifted. The ’60s version came in the highest. I asked Kimmerle if she was comfortable saying the treat had changed. “Clearly the product has changed,” she said. “Not only the recipe but the packaging, the production.” We were back to the Ship of Theseus, or what Kimmerle called “a tea bag with no tea in it.” Specifically, she said, the “center of gravity” of the cup had shifted. The earlier versions had an “equal partnership” between peanut butter and chocolate, and in today’s, “you see the profile leaning more toward sweetness with textural inconsistencies.” It fit with what Dewey, in his official capacity as an R&D guy, recalled being asked to do over the years: bring cheaper components “as high as we could” on the ingredient decks without making the product into something unrecognizable.
I walked back to the train with a horrible headache and a burning tongue past a wellness clinic advertising a GLP-1 sale. Later, I met some friends for dinner in the suburbs, and one told me she only buys her kids board games at Goodwill because the new ones are “flimsier” than they used to be. One of Kimmerle’s interns appeared in the restaurant as if from the ether — he was moonlighting there as a busboy. Reality had started to feel like a compound version of itself.
Illustration: Bruno Zocca
A few days later, Kimmerle overnighted the Reese’s re-creations to Brad Reese, and we hopped on Zoom for another blind taste test. In the weeks after his post, Reese had decided to put his weight behind MrBeast, filming a video officially endorsing his Feastables peanut-butter cups. “I just think chocolate should be chocolate! That’s a crazy idea,” said MrBeast, who last year trapped a man inside a burning building. “They’re not Reese’s, but they’re a worthy competitor,” Reese told me. He’d stopped wearing his Reese’s shirt in public because he was no longer proud to represent the brand, but he was wearing it on the call. He lamented that “in Palm Beach, nobody’s having a good time anymore,” referring to the private-equity guys listlessly roaming the streets. I asked why. “It’s never enough,” he said. “Don’t you understand? No matter how much money you have, Elon Musk has more.”
Reese had negative-to-neutral reactions to all of the peanut-butter cups. He called the earliest re-creation “kind of crunchy” and said the pulled-from-the-shelves Reese’s “didn’t taste like a Reese’s.” The version Kimmerle made to match his ’60s ideal was wrong, too. He “wasn’t impressed” with any of them but didn’t have much to say by way of specific details.
Kimmerle studied him for a moment. “Are you taking any medication for your cancer condition?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “Seventeen.” Kimmerle nodded slowly. “In my experience being a taster, sometimes medications can mask not only your taste but your texture,” she said. He pondered that for a moment. “Over the last month, I’ve been on Ozempic,” he said. “It’s like I don’t enjoy anything anymore. I used to love hot sauce, mustard. I don’t really care anymore because of the Ozempic.” (He’s since stopped taking it.)
Tasting the cups had a sort of Rosebud effect on Reese. He began digging into his family’s past as he chewed. He said Hershey was wrong about the year his grandfather created the Reese’s cup; on the official website, it says 1928 when by 1926, his grandfather had already built a factory attached to his house to manufacture the cups. “I pointed that out to Hershey over and over again,” he said. He described the slight as “condescending to my grandfather.” Suddenly, he was remembering his father’s death.
“Four months before my father died in 2005, he called me in the middle of the night. I was 50 years old. He said he didn’t want to die, and he was bawling. I said, ‘Of course you don’t want to die.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. I don’t want to go to heaven.’ I said, ‘Dad, that doesn’t make any sense.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to face my father. I double-crossed him.’ I said, ‘What do you mean you double-crossed Grandpa?’ He said, ‘He made me promise that if he gave me half his shares, I would never sell the company.’” Reese looked troubled. “I found that out at the age of 50. Okay? My grandfather gave strict orders to my father. I’m sure he gave it to his other sons too: ‘Never sell this company.’” Reese had been trying to save Reese’s from what he described as “infinite squandering” ever since. “Why am I passionate about it? Because it wasn’t my fault,” he said. “The family sold the business. I was 7 years old.”
Illustration: Bruno Zocca
So it turned out that Reese’s LinkedIn post, and everything that followed, was at least partly about doing right by his father, who didn’t do right by his father. It was a classic American story about men and the things they will do to cheat death (betray their fathers) and how, with enough drugs, you could lose the ability to taste or feel things. None of that meant Reese was wrong about the peanut-butter cups, but it certainly complicated the narrative.
A short while after that, Reese and I were on one of our regular calls when he decided, rather abruptly, to three-way call Todd Scott, the manager of corporate brand at Hershey, to whom he’d addressed his original missive — and who had declined to talk to me all those months ago. Scott didn’t answer, so Reese left him a stern voice-mail. “Todd? Todd, this is Brad Reese. Can you get in touch with Rachel Handler at New York Magazine? She’s doing a story,” he said. For some reason, it worked, and in early October, I got on a call with R&D senior director Shawn Houser-Fedor.
Houser-Fedor grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Her father worked at the park, and she has been at the company for 30 years. She was unfailingly patient and polite and incredibly well media-trained. I tried to get answers and only sometimes succeeded. I started small: What products, specifically, was Hershey going to pivot back to old formulas by 2027? “A small portion of these limited-edition seasonal offerings that aren’t currently using our classic recipes,” she said. “But the year-round products that we make every day, the Hershey bars and Kisses and Reese’s cups, aren’t changing.” They’d be dropping the chocolates at various times throughout 2027, beginning with Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, which she noted fall on the same day next year, a Gregorian confluence that may destroy thousands of heterosexual relationships.
But what were the old formulas, exactly? What year would they be reverting the chocolates to? “I don’t know specifically what year,” she said. “I know I’ve been here for a long time. I would say it will match and be the classic recipe we use on our Reese’s cups.”
Meaning no vegetable oil, just cocoa butter? “As we think about many of the Reese’s cups, there’s multiple different recipes depending on whether it has additional components in it beyond chocolate and peanut butter,” she replied. She pointed to Reese’s Fast Break as an example, which includes a chewy nougat layer.
She hadn’t answered my question, so I tried a different tack. Why was the brand so adamant that the original Reese’s cup recipe hadn’t changed when it clearly had, as indicated by the ingredients — including TBHQ and PGPR — listed on the wrapper? “Times have changed, regulations have changed,” she said. “We evolve our recipes to be up to date with all of those regulations. At the end of the day, we’re providing the consumer the same balance of chocolate and peanut butter we’ve always had in our classic recipe.”
So Hershey had added the TBHQ and PGPR because of regulations? “A lot of times it has to do with what needs to be disclosed,” she said. “And what’s great about Hershey is that consumers can trust the Hershey Company will always be transparent about what we’re doing.” Did she think those chemicals affected the taste? “From a flavor perspective, I wouldn’t anticipate that, particularly because of how small of an amount is in there.” She added how important feedback was to the brand, how the company was always monitoring social media and doing consumer taste tests and checking in with people at Chocolate World. “Everything we do is based on that desire to delight the consumer, to get them to experience moments of goodness.” Could the COVID-era labeling loophole Kimmerle had mentioned account for the differences we were tasting? “That’s interesting,” Houser-Fedor said. “It’s not something I’m very familiar with. It would probably be better to talk to one of the regulatory experts in that space.” (When I followed up with Scott on that point, he didn’t respond.)
I returned to my original question: Were there any vegetable oils lurking in the classic recipes? “It’s what we have on the label,” she said. “We’re not hiding anything.”
I realized the Hershey corporation and I had a fundamental difference of opinion on what the word change means. We were operating on separate planes of existence. On my plane, everything around me was tangibly degrading. On Hershey’s, “times” had changed, “regulations” had changed, but the recipe had miraculously stayed the same. Adding TBHQ and PGPR, or getting further alienated from the means of production, did not constitute “change.” This was merely “evolution,” and like the primordial sea creatures crawling forth from the ocean that would eventually become me and Shawn Houser-Fedor, Hershey was powerless to stop it.
Perhaps for Hershey — or anyone — it’s easier to smile and pretend nothing has changed and nothing will change, that we were experiencing endless moments of goodness. That everything was the same balance of chocolate and peanut butter it had always been. I understood and empathized with this reality; it was one I visited whenever I ate a combo THC-CBD gummy and watched Emily in Paris. But I couldn’t live there full time. I had to face the truth. And the problem was not just that chocolate tasted different — it was the added indignity of being told that it didn’t.
Illustration: Bruno Zocca
It’s important to remember that as bad as things are, they can always get worse. In a decade, we might look back fondly upon the years we spent worrying about PGPR and vegetable oils in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Because right now, dozens of companies, including most of big chocolate (though notably not Hershey), are racing against one another and the countdown to our planet’s death to come up with ways to make chocolate that is not actually chocolate, or what Kimmerle refers to as “faux-coa.” There’s “chocolate” made from dates, coffee grounds, sunflower seeds, tomato skin, fava beans, soy pulp left over from tofu. Chocolate grown in a lab; chocolate IP generated by an AI model named Giuseppe. The last is at the center of a company called NotCo, which is working to generate plant-based versions of basically every food and whose young CEO, Matias Muchnick, hopped on a Zoom with me.
He sat in front of a fake background of fake books without titles, which I asked him about. “I want to mislead people that I am a guy who reads a lot, but I’m truly not,” he said. As for his fake chocolate, he couldn’t tell me which companies he’d worked with or how exactly it was made (he’d sold the IP) or where I could find it in stores. Cocoa, he said, was the hardest thing his company had to reengineer in terms of taste and one of the most threatened ingredients due to climate change; in 2018, Business Insider warned that we could run out of cacao plants as early as 2050. “We are in the crisis mode of cocoa. And this will expand to orange juice. This will expand to hazelnuts, this will expand to almonds and many other important sources of ingredients of the most iconic and powerful brands in the world,” he said calmly. “You’re always faced with this philosophical idea of What would you rather do? Continue eating high-quality chocolates at $40 per bar — let’s go ridiculous, right? Or would you rather still have the chance of buying a $12, $10, $7 bar?”
Companies like NotCo claim to be solving the problem of chocolate sustainability: It’s slave-labor free; it’s cheaper; it doesn’t require the use of cocoa, which we could run out of soon, like every other good thing on earth. None of that, however, is a given. As Gordon, the chocolate critic, explained, faux-coa is yet another thing that fucks over cocoa farmers and exacerbates a problem big chocolate itself created. “You guys have been exploiting farm labor for a hundred years, and now you’re saying we’re going to reduce our reliance on farmers,” he said. It has the potential to devastate the economy of places like Ghana that have long depended on cocoa as an export. He also takes issue with the claim that it’s “more sustainable” than chocolate. None of it has been in production long enough to know for sure, and the investments in technology and equipment are massive with unknown effects on the environment. “I’m prepared to believe that engineered cocoa substitutes are a part of a future, but I’m not going to dignify it by saying they are the future of chocolate,” he said. He plans to preemptively petition the FDA to not change the standards of identity to allow engineered cocoa replacements to be labeled “chocolate.”
As you might expect, almost all faux-coa tastes absolutely awful. The “milk chocolate” samples I tried from one company, NextCoa, owned by agribusiness multinational Cargill, tasted like cold pepperoni. The “dark chocolate” tasted like an homage to chocolate with a strong aftertaste of cinnamon. The cookie defied physics; it was both dry and oily with a strong chemical taste. Eating it evoked in me powerful dystopian fantasies. I imagined Sam Altman’s grandson’s buxom AI servant handing it to me to tide me over as I waited on a line thousands of people long, flames licking my face from a nearby data-center fire, to bid on a bed in his Tesla-sponsored underground-bunker pop-up.
There is another possible chocolate future, one that would involve the industry working in harmony to come up with regulations and formulas that protect everyone, including farmers. In that world, chocolate would have to cost what it actually costs, which is far more than most consumers would want — or be able — to pay for it, creating a different sort of nightmare scenario in which only the rich can afford to eat real chocolate and the rest of us are forced to munch on AI-generated, IP-based “chocolate” made from old beer.
Today, there are still people out there making chocolate at prices that reflect its labor and value. Guittard, of course, and his personal favorites that have “stuck by their guns” — See’s, Justin’s. Or one of my favorites, Katrina Markoff, who started the bespoke chocolate company Vosges Haut-Chocolat in 1998 in Chicago, producing luxury chocolate with ingredients like bacon and curry, and whom Kimmerle credits with changing the chocolate landscape entirely. A few years ago, she says investors edged her out of her own company. She started again with a company called Violet Flame. I met up with her in a coffee shop in Chicago to taste the new stuff. Markoff, a gentle woman wearing bright-purple eyeliner, was openly traumatized by what had happened to her and channeled that into the way she was making and marketing her chocolate, which she sees as a ritualistic, almost spiritual experience for our “fearful, depressed” nation. She liked to think about chocolate as the Mayans once did, as “heart medicine”: “They would say that when they drank it, they would go to this place and it was so much lighter.”
As her company was yanked from beneath her, “I started realizing that when I was tasting chocolate, I wasn’t overthinking. And when I wasn’t overthinking, I started to get very calm,” she said. “When you have an exceptional food experience, you’re swimming in the beauty of your senses, and you can’t be somewhere else.” Markoff was living on a third plane, one where we were in touch with our bodies, where we weren’t losing our sense of connection to basic things like taste and smell, where we could stay alert to the world around us. I wanted to live there but could only afford to do a bit of tourism.
Her new chocolates are some of the best I tasted: rich, layered, complex, and, yes, incredibly luxurious. They’re made with things like hazelnuts from a UNESCO heritage site in Italy, raspberries from a woman-owned farm in the north of France, Bronte pistachios from a farm in Sicily, the type of sea buckthorn that Alexander the Great used to give to his troops to help with immunity. They’re currently sold in a few small stores and (mostly) online — $64 gets you 16 chocolate truffles, and $15 gets you four. She knows it’s a tough sell for most people but sees it as akin to paying for a yoga class or even a therapy session. I brought a few boxes over to a friend’s house, and we finished all of them over the course of a few hours, which was the opposite of Markoff’s intention. We’re only human.
