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### Jim's Corner & QOTW ###
Hi all,
I think I say this most Sundays but a record number of visitors visited the site this week thanks mainly to some handy 'Re-Tweets' on Twitter courtesy of Stephen Fry and Lilly Allen. More on that will follow with 'Star & Their Bars - Part 2' which will be up within the coming weeks.
Believe it or not we are drawing close to the end of the year, which brings me on to 'Question of the Week' which makes a triumphant return after a two week absence. The question I want to pose to you is ....
'Do you want a ChocolateMission awards ceremony? i.e. Best Milk Chocolate bar of 2009 etc'
If the demand is there then I will most certainly put one together.
That is all from me this week - keep the feedback coming in it is always great to hear from you all.
JIM
The ChocolateMission Omnibus:
This week I took a look at some products that were out of my usual remit firstly looking at the chocolate Mini Rolls market both reviewing the McVitie's Mars and Cadbury offerings (HERE).
In between those reviews I also took time to dish out a score for Cadbury Fingers (HERE) which failed to impress the likes of Jack now that they aren't made with Dairy Milk. Poor planning on my part meant that I managed to publish three Cadbury reviews in a row (DOH!) with the third being the Cadbury Dairy Milk Coconut Rough (HERE). This reviewed sparked questions from Gemma and Maggs as to why we don't have more coconut products here in the UK!? Conclusions were that it was mostly down to the Bounty Monopoly!
The scores for the week then took a turn for the worse with my review of the Feodora Gourmet Chocolade Granatapfel (HERE), though the week ended well with Whittaker's Original Peanut Block (HERE) obtaining a massive 9.2 score.
News from the Chocolate Market:
* Cadbury have added a dash of caramel to their Buttons range. See HERE
* Cadbury are also bringing out some Halloween goodies - 'Trick or Treat Mini Rolls'. See HERE
* Mars Dark is being reintroduced for a limited time. Thanks to several readers for sending this story to me. See HERE
* Nutella is about to celebrate it's 45th birthday. Old huh!? See HERE
* Surely Hershey's arent going to takeover Cadbury? See HERE
Post from other Blogs I enjoyed this week:
* ZOMG Candy - Has been taking a look at various Ritter Sport bars in the last week. Well worth a look at. See HERE
* GiGi Reviews - Has been lucky enough to be getting stuck into some Iced Coffee drinks this week. We have a shocking lack of these in the UK. See HERE
* The Impulsive Buy - Marvo looks as if he has been importing energy drinks from the Netherlands. Sounds expensive business to me! See HERE
* ChocaBlog - This actually got posted last week but I forgot to mention it ... Fancy writing chocolate reviews yourself? These guys here need a new writer!! See HERE
* Candy Blog - Cybele has been reviewing some more Trader Joe's products! I am not jealous ... honest ;) This PB&J bar looks delicious. See HERE
Sunday, 20 September 2009
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33 comments:
Hershey's taking over Cadbury? That would be even worse than Kraft! lol seriously though I really hope Cadbury resist all these offers, Hershey getting their hands on it doesn't even bear thinking about (despite the few and far between possible plus sides.
I would love to see some sorts of awards given out DO IT
Yes please do some end of year awards.
Just make sure there is a white chocolate award though ;)
Yes for the awards :)
If Hershey took over Cadbury I suppose they may bring out a Dairy Milk Peanut Butter? But then they might cheapen the recipe...bleurgh. I'd rather Kraft take them over, at least their products have some sort of quality to them (Toblerone, Chocolate Orange, Cote D'or etc).
Just the thought of Hershey's taking over Cadbury makes me cry inside.
What a terrible day that would be. It would almost be assured that it would 100s of years of Cadbury tradition down the pan and just replaced by some American tat BOOO
Honestly if Hershey's takeover Cadbury and they give it the same vomit like taste I swear I will never buy one of their bars again. As Rachel put it isn't worth bearing thinking about.
We need a readers award. Make it happen!!!!!!
I love the idea of an awards ceremony! Best bars of the year etc would be good!
Lovely to see you getting some responses on Twitter to your fave bars question.
Definately agree with the end of year awards. Must make sure they keep making the nice ones, after all internet power saved the Wispa Gold!
Hershey already makes most of the Cadbury bars sold in the US. It's possible to get the UK imports, but not always easy to find them. You really don't want Hershey making Cadbury bars world-wide. I really wish Cadbury would end its agreement with Hershey; the British and Australian versions are far better.
Someone pinch me please. Hershey's taking over Cadbury? That would be a complete disaster for us Brits
You must have enjoyed the football today Jim
Awarda are a must but like someone has already said you should do one that we can all choose in addition to your own.
Readers Choice Award ;)
People who know me may find it odd that I'm defending Hershey's, but as far as whether Hershey's or Kraft would do a better job, I'd go for Hershey's.
Also, with Hershey's it's far more likely to be a merger than a takeover since the companies are valued more similarly.
(And Cadbury already ruined their own recipe when they started adding vegetable oil - the Cadbury chocolate made in the US by Hershey's is still the original formula with all cocoa butter. Hershey's has no interest in making other candies taste like Hershey's chocolate ... they've never done it with any of their other products.)
Hershey's has taken over a lot of other candy companies in the past 100 years. They have always maintained their own "brand" such as Reese's and York Peppermint Patties.
Kraft took over Toblerone and I'm sorry, it's just not as creamy as it used to be. Terry's Chocolate is also similarly over-sugary now. (Cote dOr I think is just the same as far as I can tell.)
All that said, I think Cadbury should stand strong and resist takeover-merging with anyone. We need autonomous companies.
Noooo..UK Cadbury DM has always had vegetable fat in it - the US Hershey's Cadbury chocolate is horrible and highly unlikely to be the original formaula - and if it was, they did everyone a favour by adding vegatble fat - I know Jim quite quite enjoyed the US caramello bar- but the one i tried (and Hershey chocolate itself) is really not very nice in my view. Even if they said 'oh we're not planning on changing this that or the other, the chances are somewhere along the line the US arm would have a hold and start to infiltrate the UK bars!
As for the other brands theyve taken over the standard of chocolate - as in the Reeses say, leaves alot to be desired! The UK cadbury chocolate (and the irish and australian)all have slightly different but equally nice tates. The US Cadbury/Hersey chocolate just doesn't compare in taste and quality. The UK and/or the irish recipes in my opinion are by far the best. I don't think it's true that Hershey has no interest in making other companies chocolate taste like theirs - the cadbury choc does, mainly because it's formulated for the US/Hershey market rather than the original UK market lol
If a takeover did occur then I'd plump for Kraft, they're far more likey to keep the recipes etc the same, as they have with Terry's etc etc.
But either way i realy hope they resist and keep Cadbury as Cadbury!
I'd like to see the awards too :)
Nutella is 45? Wow... I love Nutella.
Alan / Cybele / Phil / Rachel / Steven / Cynical Girl / Hart D
Hi Everyone,
My views on this Hershey's taking over Cadbury lark resonate very much with a lot of your own.
Cybele certainly raises some good points about Hershey trying to keep it's masterbrand distinctive from everything else so I think we wouldn't necessarily have to worry about recipe changes etc.
Personally I just hope it doesen't happen so Cadbury stays as its own distinctive brand. Ineviteable in a takeover situation there will be changes of marketing etc so it would be a real shame to lose such an iconic brand.
I have nothing agaisn't Hershey or Kraft but I would much prefer Cadbury staying solus.
RE:Awards
It sounds as if these would be a welcome addition to the site annually. Look for these to appear in December.
I also like the idea of an award chosen by you all so I will make sure this happens.
Thanks everyone! Keep debating the Hershey / Cadbury issue it is interesting seing everyones thoughts.
Jim
Alan - I didn't say that Reese's was high quality chocolate. I said that the brand & quality that it was 50 years ago has been maintained. (Though they've started using PGPR as an additional emulsifier in most Reese's products but the York recipe seems unchanged as have the Mounds/Almond Joy. In fact when they did change the Almond Chocolate milk chocolate people complained and they reverted.)
I think Cadbury & Hershey's chocolate are on par with each other quality wise. I don't think either is great quality chocolate and I think that both used to be better.
I don't know how old you are so I don't know how many years of the chocolates & changes you've been through.
Ultimately it may be the consumer's responsibility to keep brands the same no matter who owns them. If they change the formula - write to the, call them & raise awareness. Then stop buying it. They're corporates driven by shareholders & profits. If no one buys the "cheaper" chocolate it's no more profitable than the stuff that people liked - so they start making it again or they go under.
Finally, I'm confused by the statement that UK Cadbury DM has always had vegetable oil in it. Why doesn't the NZ stuff or the Irish stuff then?
Cybele
I think I remembering reading that the NZ Dairy Milk has started using Vegetable fat.... and as fair as I am aware the Irish stuff always has had it.
As for Cadbury & Hershey's being on a par?? Hmmm I am not sure about that but that is probably my home bias coming through. I think Cadbury have the strongest chocolate out of the two but I really enjoy some of the ranges in Hershey's portfolio ... the potential of a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar with Reese's Peanut Butter strikes me as incredible!
Thanks
Jim
Hi Cybele,
Jim has pretty much said what i would have said in reply.. as he says Hersheys and Cadburys chocolate really aren't on par with one another but it probably is partly a home bias thing - we've grown up with cadburys dairy milk as you have with Hersheys but in the UK at least Cadbury DM is seen as a pretty decent inexpensive great quality chocolate with a long and great heritage with say Nestle rather behind it.
I'm a week off 27 lol so have seen a fair few chocolates come and go and be reformatted and reformulated but as far as I can recall DM has never changed (i think there would be an outcry if it was!)
I have had Hersheys chocolate before and remember it being incredibly sweet. It had a much lower cocoa content than Dairy Milk and Dairy Milk itself is very low at 20%!
It tasted rather cheap to me, I bought a bag of Miniatures,the dark one passable but the rest were just rather bland and tasteless to me lol. At least DM has a distinctive creamy taste and real milk.
Well, see this is where you have to agree that there's a difference between determining "good" or "passable" and preference.
I've never said Cadbury or Hershey's is bad but I wouldn't call them high-quality either - at least consistent... but I also don't think one is better than another. I do prefer one to the other in certain instances.
Personally, UK Dairy Milk has that aftertaste that reconstituted powdered milk can have. That taste reminds me of poverty and that time in my life when that was the only milk I had. That's my own issue.
I have great respect for Cadbury and their history as a Quaker-founded company. Hershey's has a similar utopian history with MS Hershey being a Mennonite (one of the Brethren). That heritage seems more of a cultural fit than Kraft, a global food powerhouse who thinks that Cadbury is a weak brand (hah!).
Jim - yes, NZ was switching to veg oil in their DM but their was such a public outcry that they reversed. The power of the people!
One last note about the veg oil issue. Cadbury is very soft and Hershey's or the American Cadbury is all cocoa butter so a bit stiffer & has a higher melt point. I live in a part of the world where the average daytime temp is 80+ for 9 months out of the year. UK DM is often a rancid pile of goop for us.
And finally, just because Hershey's milk chocolate isn't great, doesn't meant that Hershey's doesn't know how to make chocolate. They make what people buy. They also make Scharffen Berger & Dagoba. (Cadbury similarly has upscale brands.)
Lol I can see this running and running! Most people in the UK would call DM a decently high quality mass produced chocolate. It is interesting that it tastes of powdered milk to you as like I say it's made with fresh, but as you say the temperature differences mean that Cadbury (and Hershey) must formulate their chocolate to deal with the higher temperatures and so I can understand if the UK DM is not very nice after all that travelling and high tenmperatures.. similarly though Hershey chocolate tends to have a very greasy feel, (to us)as in the Reeses etc. In the UK many brands tend to use powdered milk, in place of fresh, and therefore they tend to be considered slightly poorer quality (such as nestle).. or rather Cadbury is seen as fairly unique in it's use of fresh milk lol.
Cybele / Alan
I think you both have good arguments and I think it comes down to the one thing that I always bang on about on this site .... personal preference!!
As I always say if we all thought the same thing how boring would life be!
There a few things that I would also like to bring to the table here
1) The differences in the taste of milk from different origins ... lets be honest depending on what country your from you are brought up drinkign your local milk which your taste buds obviously grow used. I don't know about you but whenever I visit a foriegn country I always think that their milk 'tastes funny' ... obviosuly it doesen't but it's simply down to my taste buds not being in tune with the local stuff.
2) Secondly Cybele raises a really good point about the condition that we try different countries chocolates in. Everything I review on this site from the likes on NZ, US, Australia etc really clocks up the air miles and are no doubt transported in very variable conditions ... thus I don't think this would do any chocolate that much good.
That is all I have for now guys but discussion is always a good thing :D
Thanks
Jim
Well, I finally got out my bars and compared them over the weekend. (I've been planning on doing a comparison between the UK & US ones - and the temps have finally eased here.)
I confirmed that the US ones are made with chocolate crumb (the chocolate & milk combination) made in the same Bournville factory that makes UK Dairy Milk. (So the geo-specific milk issue is out the window as a theory.)
They're not really that different.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/typetive/3922302938/
I'm sure if you loved one in particular it'd be jarring, but as someone who can taste the differences but not prefer one of the other - well, I can't say.
Thanks for the link!
As for the Cadbury debate, I don't have a side, but I do wish those food company behemoths would stop growing and eating up other brands.
It is interesting to see them both side by side, they kinda look similar but abit different.
However it is not true that the UK DM has no cocoa butter in it- it has plenty. Ours also list Cocoa mass which also contains cocoa butter and cocoa solids in roughly equal quantities. It also has fewer ingredients than the US, and the main ingredient is of course Milk, NOT sugar like the US one. I don't see why Hershey can't use American milk? The US one may not have vegetable fat (which is in general cooking use) in it but it does have unnecessary additives like lactose, soya lecithin, and PGPR (which is apparently a gloopy yellow liquid used as a cost saving measure to REPLACE the cocoa butter because it is cheaper, so is really a poor substitute for veg fat) heres a link- give me vegatable fat any day!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglycerol_polyricinoleate
so it is obviously untrue that the US recipe is the 'original pure' recipe when it appears worse. I also doubt the Irish recipe is the original, I think the milk must play a large part in the taste and texture, as even our bars do vary from one part of the country to another.
Also it is untrue that our bars don't have Milk Chocolate on them -they do. Take a look at the wrapper on the equivalent bar that you bought and it says in gold font 'MILK CHOCOLATE' just after Dairy Milk.
As Jim says it's all down to personal preference but i did want to point out those issues and innaccuracies.
Does 'chocolate crumb' mean the same thing as cocoa solids? Forgive me for sounding a bit dumb. Actually I'll probably google it now lol.
Alan - well you have some inaccuracies that I should point out. The UK DM uses two emulsifiers - E476 and E442. E476 is PGPR. I'm not fond of the stuff either (I don't care what color it is ... a lot of ingredients are unappealing in bulk).
I'm sure it does wonderful things to make manufacturing better, but I think it allows the fats, in milk chocolate especially, to go rancid much quicker than in chocolate that's all cocoa butter.
I believe the ingredient lactose is why the US is not quite as sweet. Lactose is a natural sugar found in milk, and since it's a component of milk it's allowed in milk chocolate in the US. It can add sweetness but not quite to the level of sugar sweetness.
Soy lecithin has been used in chocolate for a hundred years and I have no feeling about it one way or another. I've had chocolate without it and thought it was marvelous, but it was also $8 a bar, so maybe that's why it was so good.
I don't believe I ever said that UK DM didn't have cocoa butter in it. But it does have less ... or even if it's not less it has other vegetable oils that the UK standards don't even have to specify but if I know Cadbury, there's at least some Palm Oil in there.
The UK "family chocolate" definition is that it can contain no more than 5% vegetable fat ... so there's plenty of room for lots and lots of cocoa butter ... or dairy butter for that matter. (I don't think you've been following my coverage of this, which has been pretty exhaustive and gone on for many years ... far longer than blogging.)
In the US no combination of emulsifiers can constitute more than 2% of the chocolate. So the PGPR makeup is pretty low on both I'm sure.
I never thought US was "original pure", especially because of the PGPR which has only started showing up in the past 5 years. (I noticed this changeover in the mini-eggs first.) But I did think it was closer to the original recipe because I believed that the earlier formula did not have vegetable oil in it.
It's very odd that the bars that I've gotten a hold of do not say milk chocolate on the front at all. But to say that they don't is also untrue as you saw that I have a picture of it. (Perhaps it's made for Canada which has similar labeling laws to the US.)
Why doesn't Hershey's use Pennsylvania milk? Because then Hershey's would be making the chocolate, not Cadbury. Yes, there's a difference in milk ... enough that some companies that make milk chocolate label the different origins of the milk along with the beans. Cadbury chooses the beans, roasts them to their specs and balances them with their milk amounts. (Also, I don't think Cadbury was willing to tell Hershey's all the trade secrets to make their chocolate.)
You seem oddly defensive about all of this Alan. It's just some candy. It's not like one is in the position of replacing the other - yet you take it as a threat. Remember, Kraft is the one poised to take over Cadbury, not Hershey's.
I can say for sure that both used to be better. Probably not just the formula but I think they conched them longer and I think that foil was a better wrapping. Yes, I'm old enough to know.
You both have got ridiculously technical when it should mostly be down to taste. Does it matter whether it says milk chocolate on the wrapper? NO is the answer your looking for. Both of you grow up and treat this blog as a bit of fun like Jim intends it to be.
I'm not being defensive, I'm just giving a different view! You do make some good points but i still think UK DM is better and there are some flaws in your argument (as there are in mine). I do agree the old style foil was a better wrapping - it had some advantages over the modern 'all in one' wrap (and looked nicer)
JT we're not getting ridiculously technical, (or need to grow up)it's just healthy debate and an interesting look at the chocolate business. We do treat the blog in a fun way but I'm sure Jim will agree theres no reason for there not to be a bit of a more serious slant/opinion/debate on one topic or other ocassionally...
Cybele / Alan / JT
Wow you guys certainly know your stuff.
JT: Alan is correct fella it is just a debate and I feel that both Cybele and Alan have constructed their arguments fairly and in a non inflammatory manner. I think telling them to grow up is rather silly since they are both older than myself and the fact that it is not necessary in the first place.
As lighthearted as this site is there is always time for more serious opinions to be expressed.
Alan / Cybele ... I have to admit you guys have lost me a little :) this stuff is far too technical for me haha! When I look at the ingredients my naivety normally leads me to only checking out the levels of saturated and trans fats etc ... apart from that I mainly leave colourings / flavourings etc out the equation. I am sure if I was as knowledgeable as you two I probably wouldn't end up eating half the stuff I do.
I for one am enjoying this debate - I hope others will share their views in the future.
Thanks
Jim
Lol it's just general research really, google is a wonderful thing haha!
Cybele, if you turn the wrapper over you'll see Milk Chocolate above the ingredients. I think it was more of a design choice to leave it off the front as Cadbury were going through a 'streamline' look at the time (2003-now) and everyone knows what it is. It's nearly always featured on the front in the past. Also the snazzy brand new wrapper (2009-)has it reinstated on the front in gold to match the Cadbury logo :) If you spot any newer bars you'll see it.
Does the fairtrade DM taste any different? I haven't had bar yet, I know it shouldn't make any differnce atall to the taste, I'm just curious lol
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