Is it chocolate? Your chances of finding the real thing are shrinking | Canada Voices

Before kids begin this year’s Easter egg hunts, it’s worth conducting another search, this time on the labels of those foil-wrapped confections. Do they actually contain chocolate?

While you’re at it, take a look at the candy bars you impulsively grab in the checkout lane. Cadbury Mini Eggs, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, Oh Henry, Wunderbar, Caramilk, Mr. Big, Mars and Terry’s Orange are just a handful of products that can no longer legally call themselves chocolate. Manufacturers have renamed some of them “candy” or described them as having a “chocolatey coating.”

Perhaps you’ve picked up on the changes: a more cloying taste, a waxier texture, a flatter flavour. “Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, I’m getting older’ or ‘my tastebuds changed’ or that they got a bad batch,” but actually it’s the ingredients that have changed, says Brad Reese, the 70-year-old grandson of the inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Some call it skimpflation. Brad Reese, who was 7 when his family’s company was sold to Hershey’s, ate a Reese’s product every day for much of his life but recently stopped because he’s so offended by product reformulations. In his words, it’s “a total betrayal.”

The biggest players in confections have been tweaking their products over the past decade and a half to produce them more cheaply. This industry shift has been supercharged by the volatility of cocoa prices in the past few years, which peaked at US$10.75 a kilo in January, 2025, up 310 per cent from two years earlier, according to the World Bank. Climate change – which has shortened growing seasons and created conditions for disease to spread – has wreaked havoc on cocoa yields, especially in West Africa, where much of the world’s supply is produced.

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Last year the price began plummeting, returning to what it was in summer 2023, but consumers aren’t yet feeling that change. Confections (a category that includes chocolate and gum) increased in price by about 35 per cent from January, 2020, to January, 2026, according to Canada’s Consumer Price Index.

Aside from hiking prices, many chocolate manufacturers have reduced product sizes (this shrinkflation is particularly noticeable at Halloween), but they’ve also tweaked their recipes to reduce the amount of cocoa in them. Some manufacturers have made such dramatic changes to their formulations, they no longer meet the Canadian government’s definition of “milk chocolate,” which requires the product to be at least 25 per cent cocoa solids.

Because of those labelling standards, it doesn’t take much tinkering to turn chocolate into “candy,” says Selvyn Simoes, a Toronto-based food scientist who has extensively researched chocolate. Dark chocolate, in its purest form, is made from three main ingredients: cocoa particles, cocoa butter and sugar. The cocoa particles and sugar are dispersed in the fat. Milk chocolate has the same base with the addition of milk fat and milk.

When trying to cut costs, many manufacturers start by replacing the fat source in their product – subbing out cocoa butter, which is more expensive than the raw cocoa beans it’s derived from, said Christian Tyler, who has worked in the chocolate industry for 17 years and runs the Arizona firm Cacao Consulting.

It’s a practice that isn’t new. During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon blocked trade with Britain, which controlled much of the world’s supply of cocoa, and resourceful Italians blended their limited reserves with hazelnuts and sugar to make gianduja, the precursor to Nutella.

These days, Tyler has seen some manufacturers blend shea butter with cocoa butter, while others use a different derivative from cocoa beans that has a shorter shelf life. Once, Tyler was hired by a Canadian company to develop a chocolate using EPG, a synthesized version of canola oil. The chocolate had the texture of candle wax, left residue on machinery and “made me feel sick if I had a piece of it.” He told the company to look elsewhere for product development help.

The most popular fat substitute is palm oil, which has similar chemical properties to cocoa butter but is far cheaper to farm and requires less land for bigger yields. It’s what gives Nutella its creamy texture. But palm oil is a controversial product; labour exploitation is an issue in the industry, which has also been criticized for contributing to deforestation.

Simoes says that, as consumers, even if we can’t put a name to a difference, our tongues and brains can detect that there’s a change in the molecular structure of a food we’ve eaten before. Changing the fat in chocolate can have impacts not just on texture, but flavour too. A chocolatey coating made with palm oil might contain the same amount of sugar as one made with cocoa butter, but the particles of sugar are suspended in the fat source differently and could make the former taste sweeter than the latter.

That said, upping sugar volumes in confections is a common practice and many candy bars (as well as Cadbury Mini Eggs) list it as the first ingredient. Not only is it cheap, it can add bulk, Tyler says. Vanilla and synthetic extracts are frequently used to mask off-flavours that result from roasting poor-quality beans.

Wunderbar, Mr. Big and Caramilk, all of which are made by Cadbury, whose Canadian operation is owned by Mondelēz International, list sugars as their first ingredient, and also contain multiple oils – including modified palm oil. All contain unsweetened chocolate, but not enough to meet the 25-per-cent threshold to be called milk chocolate in Canada. (In the U.S., manufacturers can use the “milk chocolate” label even if their product contains only 10 per cent cocoa). Mondelēz did not respond to several requests for comment.

Brad Reese accuses the major chocolate companies of deliberately misleading consumers when they reformulate products. People see a familiar logo and don’t scrutinize the fine print to see that a confection is called “candy” instead of chocolate, or that cocoa butter is absent from the ingredients list, he says. He suggested companies are experimenting with these cheap reformulations on their seasonal offerings – such as egg-shaped confections at Easter or ghost-shaped ones at Halloween – because consumers are less likely to notice.

His public crusade for a return to “real chocolate” recently returned a victory – at least with Hershey in the United States.

This week at a presentation to investors, Hershey’s chief growth and marketing officer, Stacy Taffet, said the company will ensure that “all Hershey’s and Reese’s offerings are consistent with their brands’ classic milk and dark chocolate recipes,” which means, starting in 2027, they will no longer use the “chocolatey” coating on products. The company did not respond to a request from the Globe about whether this change will also apply to confections sold in Canada.

In an e-mailed statement before this change, Ernesto Rivera, the associate manager of corporate communications for Hershey, which makes Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, said as Hershey expands its product line, it makes recipe adjustments to allow for “new shapes, sizes and innovations” and that “different shapes simply require a different recipe to hold their form.”

One of the company’s Easter offerings, Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, contain unsweetened chocolate and peanuts, but they appear on the ingredients list after sugars and six different types of oil. There are not enough cocoa solids for the mixture to be labelled “milk chocolate.” It is not clear if the current formulation of this product will be sold in Canada next year.

Tyler said the recent surge in changes to product composition has been driven by fear that cocoa prices might keep rising for years. “These companies start reformulating, rebranding, relabelling and then all of a sudden the cocoa price comes dropping down. Had they figured out ways to weather the storm temporarily, they probably would’ve been successful with their original model.”

When a multinational tweaks a recipe to produce a product more cheaply, it’s rare to see them reverse course, even after costs come down. Packaging is also altered. At the scale these companies operate at, changing a product – and then changing it back – is like turning a cargo ship around 180 degrees, Tyler says. And with climate change affecting the industry so severely, Simoes says this could be part of a larger trend away from using cocoa beans and cocoa butter.

Hershey’s most recent quarterly results show that the volume of products sold was down compared with the previous year. The company made up for this slump in sales by increasing the price of products, which meant they still enjoyed an increase in revenue. Over all, though, profit dropped, which they mostly attributed to increased costs from tariffs and higher prices for ingredients such as cocoa.

“Trying Hershey’s as your first chocolate as a child, that sets the precedent, sets the expectation for what chocolate is,” says Jessica Ellis, Tyler’s business partner at Cacao Consulting. Even before these more recent changes, she says, grocery store offerings were vastly different from bean-to-bar chocolate. “The average consumer in North America hasn’t had the opportunity to try a pure cocoa content or cocoa-forward chocolate.”