candy makers are phasing out real cocoa in chocolate

‘No taste. “It’s inedible,” Reese’s fan Brad Reese said when he tried the company’s new product, which contains less than 2 percent cocoa.Photograph: Rita Liu/The Guardian” loading=”eager” height=”768″ width=”960″ class=”yf-lglytj loaded”/>

Just before Valentine’s Day, Brad Reese bought a bag of Reese’s Unwrapped Peanut Butter Cream Mini Hearts from his local convenience store in West Palm Beach, Florida. It’s a brand new product launched just for the holidays with the slogan: “We’ll never break your heart.”

Reese is a huge fan of Reese’s and makes it a point to try all the products the company makes. It’s no coincidence: he’s one of them this Reeses is the grandson of HB Reese, the Hershey dairy farmer who invented the peanut butter cup in 1928. Although he never worked at Reese’s or Hershey’s (the latter purchased the Peanut Butter Cup Company in 1963), Reese considers himself a custodian of HB’s legacy. He also has a keen interest in The Hershey Company and its leadership.

The unwrapped Nutella Cream Mini Hearts proved to be a disappointment. “I took two bites and had to spit it out,” Reese said. “In 70 years of my life, I’ve never had anything like this happen to me. There’s no taste. It’s inedible.”

Rhys took a closer look at the packaging, especially 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 ingredients list included a disclaimer saying the candy contained less than 2 percent cocoa. He went to the candy aisle of a nearby supermarket to investigate further and discovered that several other Reese’s and Hershey’s products, including Take 5, Mr Goodbar and Heath Bars, were also missing milk chocolate.

Obviously, cocoa is the core ingredient of chocolate. It’s a complex food that’s almost bitter in its flavor. Ever since humans started eating it, they’ve combined it with other ingredients like cinnamon and cayenne pepper to make it tastier. Hershey’s, Reese’s, and other commercial chocolate companies use sugar, milk, and oil. For Reese, the extras finally overshadowed the bittersweetness of the cocoa.

Outraged and a bit frustrated, Reese complained in an open letter on LinkedIn to Todd Scott, Hershey’s brand and editorial manager. “How does The Hershey Company continue to position REESE’S as its flagship brand, a symbol of trust, quality and leadership, while quietly replacing the ingredients that originally built REESE’S trust (milk chocolate + peanut butter)?” he wrote.

Hershey has been blaming cocoa beans for volatility

Scott did not respond directly, but because of Reese’s lineage, the media took notice. MrBeast invited Reese to join his YouTube channel to try out his own Feastables brand peanut butter cups. Hershey’s did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment but issued two statements in response to Reese’s remarks, one from the Reese family saying that most descendants of the family disagree with Brad’s criticism, and another defending the integrity of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, which is still made with milk chocolate and peanut butter as usual, while acknowledging some experimentation with other shapes and products.

“Hershey’s has been blaming it on the volatility of the cocoa bean,” Reese said. “They’re trying to squeeze every last penny they can out of it.”

In fact, the volatile cocoa market is a major factor in chocolate pricing. Since 2020, the climate crisis has led to cycles of drought and floods in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which produce 70% of global chocolate. Alexis Villasis, an economist at Ohio State University who studies the chocolate industry, said this led to disease, destroying cocoa plantations and reducing the supply of cocoa. (Like Reese, Villasis comes from a chocolate family: His grandparents were cocoa growers in Ecuador.)

However, the demand for chocolate has only increased. As Villasis said, our society is built around chocolate. It has become a must-have for holiday celebrations such as Halloween, Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day. It’s promoted as the ultimate cheap luxury item to brighten dreary times, and seasonal sales have continued to grow despite the rise of GLP-1 and healthier lifestyles. Limited supply and greater demand are causing prices to rise: from $2,000-3,000 to $12,000 per ton by 2024. “In all my years in this industry, I have never seen a cocoa market like what we are experiencing today,” Mark Taylor, Hershey’s senior director of strategic sourcing, wrote on the company’s website in April 2025.

This presents Hershey with a conundrum. Like its British counterparts Cadbury and Rowntree’s, the company was founded to produce cheap chocolate for the masses: the original Reese’s Cup sold for a penny (now extinct). To keep prices low, big chocolate makers have resorted to what Villasis calls “creative” strategies, such as shrinking inflation or selling smaller candies for the same price. This is particularly popular in the UK and Europe: Toblerone is particularly closely watched by fans who monitor the shape and size of gold bars. But the most creative solution is reformulation.

“They are now replacing cocoa with other types of things, like more milk, more almonds or other types of coatings,” Villasis said.

Nestlé-owned German brand Choco Crossies recently announced it would eliminate cocoa entirely from its new Snack Vibes range, replacing it with ChoViva, a lab-grown “chocolate alternative” made from fermented sunflower and grape seeds.

These companies will look for any type of solution that maximizes profits

The US, UK and EU all have government regulations on how much or how little cocoa a product can contain and still be considered “chocolate”, but these rules are much stricter in Europe. In the UK, for example, after Pladis reduced the cocoa bean content in its McVitie’s Penguin and Club chocolate bars to less than 20%, both snacks were officially downgraded from “chocolate” to “chocolate flavour”. In the US, the threshold is 15%, and low-cocoa treats like Unwrapped Mini Hearts can still be described as “chocolate candy.”

In late 2025, cocoa prices fell for the first time in five years. West African cocoa plantations have recovered from the weather shocks of the early 2020s and are restarting production. However, this is not a harbinger of the return of cheap chocolate. Most chocolate companies have purchased cocoa in advance at higher prices and are still trying to figure this out. They also have to rebuild profits; last year, “they absorbed a lot of the shock,” Villasis said. Plus, in terms of inflation, it’s much harder to lower prices than to raise them.

Cocoa supplies remain limited. The UK and EU have implemented stricter rules on buying cocoa from deforested areas, and chocolate companies everywhere are aware of the poor image of working with growers who use enslaved children as free labor. Villasis said many young cocoa farmers are abandoning their plantations to find work in the cities. Ecuador and Indonesia are both expected to overtake West Africa as the world’s largest source of cocoa, but they are also vulnerable to climate breakdown.

So what can the average consumer do? Brad Reese is one of them, and he vowed he would never buy a Reese product again. “Would I, the grandson of HB Reese, say that?” he said. “Blasphemy!”

If enough people join him, Hershey may respond. “These big companies are testing consumer reaction,” Villasis said. “They will adjust accordingly.”

Consumers are also becoming more savvy about reading packaging. Many people have cracked the code of “milk chocolate” vs. “chocolate candy” and know that the ingredients are listed in order of largest first. A quick look at Reese’s new Easter range reveals that the snack-sized peanut butter eggs contain real milk chocolate, while the mini eggs are mostly sugar and only have a chocolate-flavored coating.

Related: ‘Tastes like Play-Doh’: The best (and worst) chocolate bars, tasted and ranked

Those who are truly passionate about chocolate may be willing to spend more for brands like Tony’s Chocolonely, which focuses on ethically sourced ingredients, or for premium chocolate bars like Pacari (Villacis’ personal favorite), which contain more than 50 percent cocoa and cost over $10. But the real appeal of mass-market chocolate like Hershey’s has always been its affordability.

“These companies are going to look for any type of solution that maximizes profits,” Villasis said. “If that means replacing all the chocolate in the product, consumers will accept it as long as they continue to buy it.”

Reese sees things slightly differently. “I just don’t see how Hershey’s can be successful long-term with Reese’s consumers,” he said. “Their trust has been betrayed. They realize they have to be vigilant to make sure they are not fooled.”