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Major Candy Brands Are Switching From Actual Chocolate to ‘Chocolatey Candy’ (Read: Brown Candle Wax)
Jim Vorel, writing just yesterday for Jezebel:
It can be hard to know what exactly to call the substances that
are now found coating many major candy bars such as Butterfinger,
Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar or Rolos. Food scientists refer
to it as “compound chocolate” coating, because it’s made from
actual cocoa powder, but replaces the more expensive source of fat
(cocoa butter) with cheaper, lower-quality vegetable fats. When
Hershey brands such as Mr. Goodbar or Almond Joy made the switch
in recent years, their labels subtly changed from claiming
that they were “milk chocolate,” to “chocolate candy,” which
strikes me as particularly insidious phrasing. A more obvious
indicator is another word that many companies use: “Chocolatey”
coating. Wondering how much this scourge had infiltrated my own
home, I took a look moments ago at several packages of Girl Scout
Cookies, only to find the inevitable: Both my Thin Mints and
Peanut Butter Patties are also made with compound chocolate,
rather than the real thing. I can hardly pretend to be surprised.
Even in candies that continue to use real chocolate, meanwhile,
cost-cutting measures have sometimes been employed, such as the
milk chocolate coating of a Snickers bar becoming slightly thinner
over time. Some products even mix real chocolate and compound
chocolate in a single cookie or candy.
★
Every Day, the Chocolate We Eat Gets Worse. Some of It Is No Longer “Chocolate.”
Even as cocoa prices fall, companies are learning a scary lesson: Americans don't notice when you give them fake chocolate.
Jim Vorel -->
By Jim Vorel |
February 24, 2026 | 3:54pm
Photo via Unsplash, Tetiana Bykovets
FoodSplinter
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[Every Day, the Chocolate We Eat Gets Worse. Some of It Is No Longer “Chocolate.”]
From a consumer perspective, there are few things that portend a worse outcome than a company knowingly making its product worse in order to save a few bucks, and finding out that just as many customers will still buy it anyway. This scenario, in a nutshell (beanshell?) has been the dominant story in the world of chocolate for the last few years, with the enshittification of the entire segment the end result of crop failures and cocoa bean scarcity that sent the price of cocoa soaring to stratospheric heights in 2024 and 2025. More recently, those prices have steadily come back down to Earth, but guess what hasn’t changed back to how it was before? The chocolate. In fact, many of the world’s biggest sellers of chocolate-dependent treats are instead pushing forward on the embrace of cheaper replacements, increasingly convinced of the fact that consumers simply don’t know enough to notice or care. And they’re probably right.
Climate change is of course largely to thank for the scarcity of cocoa beans that led prices in 2025 to peak at more than $10,000 per ton, almost five times what the price was in the summer of 2022. Unlike oddball, climate-adjacent stories such as an uptick in mushroom poisonings or a deadly rash of Japanese bear attacks, the climate vector in cocoa is far easier to understand at a glance. Longer droughts, extreme heat, unpredictable rainfall and insect-driven infection amplified by climate change have all played a part in decimating cocoa yields, with one nonprofit research group’s 2025 study finding that most of West Africa’s cocoa-growing regions now experience six additional weeks of extreme heat per year over the last decade. No doubt there are other factors as well, like the Donald Trump tariffs just struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, but it doesn’t take any grasp of economics to understand why chocolate prices went through the roof.
Less chocolate in your chocolate: major manufacturers explore ways to cope with cocoa shortages due to upheaval and climate change. www.confectionerynews.com/Article/2026…
(Note that one approach, alkalinizing the cocoa, undermines the antioxidant health benefits of chocolate.)
— Honest Chocolates (@honestchocs.bsky.social) Jan 20, 2026 at 6:16 AM
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