Perhaps this sounds familiar: You have a favorite chocolate bar from childhood—the one for which you once traded six Tootsie Roll Pops on Halloween 1998—but then life happens, and you don’t have one for months or even years. When you finally eat one again, it doesn’t taste the same and you’re not sure why. What gives?
The simplest explanation is that your palate has changed. As we get older, eating and drinking new things trains our palate, steering it in new directions (you like kale now?! And dark chocolate!)—which often leaves the sugary predilections of childhood behind. But it’s also a sad fact that as we get older, our taste buds stop regenerating, which dulls the palate. Our sense of smell dims. Noxious things in the environment, like chemicals in cigarettes and air pollution, further hinder taste and smell. It’s a bummer.
There may be other factors in play, though. Check the candy bar’s ingredient list. Has it changed recently? Even if you don’t monitor ingredient lists on the regular, a quick Google search of many candy bars will yield images of wrappers going back years. The producer may have switched up the recipe, as I recently learned was the case with a longtime obsession, Caramello. Sometime between the late 1990s and now, the Caramello recipe was tweaked to include an emulsifying filler in order to reduce the overall amount of cocoa butter required. (In my opinion, the new iteration lacks the rich creaminess of the original. Curse you, endless march of time!) The same issue probably affects other candy bars, according to Susan Whiteside, a vice president of public relations and marketing communications for the National Confectioners Association.
“I can tell you that about 65 percent of candies that are on the market have been around for more than 50 years,” she explained. “Tweaks seem fairly likely over a period of time like that.”
But a third explanation is, to me, the most fascinating. The taste of a candy bar’s individual ingredients always changes from batch to batch, and this may influence the flavor of the final product.
It all comes down to natural variance in ingredients, says Susan Benjamin, author of Sweet as Sin, a history of American candy. For instance, one season’s batch of cacao may be greener and more bitter than that of the previous, and sugar grains may be larger or smaller. The state of a plantation’s teak trees, often planted between rows of cacao to provide shade, can also affect the final output. It’s the candy bar producer’s job to balance these variables, sometimes using more or less of any one particular ingredient to create a candy bar with a standardized taste.
“When I interviewed the folks at Wilbur [Chocolate], owned by Cargill, they did not call the ingredient list a ‘recipe’ but a formula, a point they emphasized, as the quantities of each ingredient would vary from batch to batch,” Benjamin wrote in an email. “This concept of uniformity is relatively new in human history—an outcome of the Industrial Revolution—but one we now expect, regardless of how unnatural and forced that outcome is.”
Whiteside agrees with Benjamin to a point. The taste of individual ingredients can vary wildly from batch to batch, she confirmed, although she personally finds it hard to believe that a normal person could discern, in a final product, that the cacao was slightly more acidic, the cocoa butter was a tad creamier, or anything else specific to one ingredient.
“From year to year, even batch to batch, people can sometimes notice changes [in individual ingredients],” she said. “That’s why [chocolate] blending is so important, because it’s very important for chocolatiers to have a very consistent taste from year to year and batch to batch. ... There are a lot of people working to make sure that’s true.”
But could someone with an especially keen sense of taste discern the difference in a final candy bar? “It’s possible,” she allowed. “By the time you get to that stage, I honestly don’t know.”
Inquiries on the subject to Hershey, Mars, Ghirardelli, and Whitman's were not returned, which only makes me more curious. Are candy bars are like fine wine, tasting different from year to year? If so, a world of possibilities just opened up.
