Is Chocolate Still Chocolate?

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Photo: Alex Paganelli for New York Magazine

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The Chocolate Conspiracy

Everyone in my life agreed: It tastes different now. I ventured into the molten belly of our crumbling world to find out why.

By Rachel Handler, a features writer at Vulture and New York

Oct. 19, 2026

Photo: Alex Paganelli for New York Magazine

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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).

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 of