Brad Reese, grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H.B. Reese, caused a stir this year with his claims that The Hershey Company had changed his grandfather’s recipes beyond recognition. In a public post on LinkedIn, Reese called out “formulation decisions that replace milk chocolate with compound coatings and peanut butter with peanutbutterstyle crèmes.”
In response, Hershey stated that the famous Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are made the same way they’ve always been, but when it comes to other candies, “we make product recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes, and innovations.” Hershey has been careful not to say specifically which recipes they have changed, but consumers have noticed differences between ingredients listed for the U.S. and European versions of the same products, as well as wording changes to ingredient labels.
Under FDA regulations, products must have specific percentages of base ingredients to be legally labeled as “peanut butter” or “chocolate.” Companies may circumvent these with terms like “peanut butter creme” or “chocolate candy.” But regardless of what it says on the label, Reese and other consumers have claimed that some products just don’t taste the same as they used to.
So how much of this is truth, and how much is just nostalgia for the flavors of childhood? Could your favorite candy really taste different than it used to, due to the company changing their recipe?
Companies are always changing recipes; you just might not know it
When it comes to recipes being changed, “I think it’s more than just candy. I think it’s all foods,” says Dr. Richard Hartel, a professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Companies are always looking at ways to save money.” Hartel identifies cost reduction as the primary reason why companies change their recipes. “Essentially, you look for ingredients that you can find cheaper alternatives to, but still try and maintain the same flavor,” he says.
Hartel uses caramel as an example of how cost reduction works in industrial candymaking. “The best-tasting caramel is one that’s made using the best, high-quality milk ingredient,” he says, “And the fat being completely milk fat.”
Instead of full-fat whole milk, a company might save some money by replacing it with skimmed milk plus coconut or vegetable oil. “Proteins are really the key element in making a caramel, because that’s what helps generate the browning flavors and colors,” says Hartel. Instead of using milk or milk powder for protein, a company might replace it with whey, a protein-rich byproduct of cheesemaking.
In the case of chocolate, cost reduction tweaks might look like using less real cocoa, though still above the 10 percent “chocolate liquor” base product required to meet the FDA definition of milk chocolate.
With minor changes like this, “as long as the mass of the ingredients stays the same, in [a] relative sense, the ingredient list wouldn’t change,” says Hartel. This means that within these restrictions, a company can change its recipe as often as they like without you knowing about it. And, yes, that this might over time result in products tasting different than they used to.
Companies try to make new recipes taste the same
Hartel points out that “Hershey sells their chocolate based on a very specific flavor profile,” as do many other chocolate brands. The specific taste of a chocolate company’s chocolate is a core part of their brand identity and reputation. So while all these recipe changes may cause concern, they aren’t being made haphazardly.
Throughout the cost reduction process, various kinds of testing are done to ensure that the new recipe doesn’t deviate too far from the original. These include sensory panels like taste tests with trained tasting experts, but there are also many other criteria. “You’ve got to measure the textural properties like hardness, firmness, pulling, or chewiness, that kind of stuff, with the sensory attributes,” says Hartel.
Companies aim for differences that are small enough to be unnoticeable in testing from one year to the next. But continual minute changes may build up over time.
Hartel shares what he calls “a typical story that’s told in the food industry about cost reduction.” If you successfully tweak a product recipe for cost, even expert tasters will not be able to tell the new recipe from last year’s. But what if you repeat this process every year for 10 years?
If you “looked at your product 10 years ago [compared] with what you have now, that can be a very different product,” says Hartel. “Each year’s shift is imperceptible.”
When do companies have to inform the public that a recipe is different?
At what point does a company need to inform the public that a recipe has been changed? “Typically companies don’t do that unless they’re trying to do something special,” says Hartel, such as advertising a recipe as improved.
Certain foods, including chocolate, milk, and ketchup, have special FDA “Standards of Identity” that determine what proportion of ingredients they can contain while being sold under the same name.
Companies are required to indicate deviations from these on their ingredient labels, as well as potential safety concerns like the addition of an allergenic ingredient. But many small changes fall within the legal identity of the product and don’t need to be publicly announced.
As an example of a widely-known product recipe change, Hartel mentions “New Coke.” This was Coca-Cola’s 1985 attempt to change their flagship soda’s formula for the first time in 99 years. New Coke was developed in response to consumer taste tests that suggested people preferred Pepsi’s sweeter flavor over the original Coke. However, New Coke proved so unpopular that the original, rebranded as “Coke Classic,” returned to stores within three months. New Coke was entirely discontinued by 2002.
This marketing blunder is so infamous that a persistent myth (denied by Coca-Cola) claims that it was a deliberate ploy to boost sales of the original soda.
However, Hartel explains, the more likely explanation was the company drawing the wrong conclusions from market research. New Coke alienated Coca-Cola’s core consumer base. They didn’t want a drink that tasted more like Pepsi; rather, says Hartel, “people drink Coke because they don’t like Pepsi.”
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So why did people seem to prefer a sweeter soda in Coca-Cola’s consumer tests? “If you give them small sips of the drink, most people like Pepsi best,” says Hartel. “When you drink a whole can of it, that sweetness overwhelms some of us, and that’s why we like Coke better.”
This is a documented phenomenon known as “the Pepsi Paradox” or “the Pepsi Challenge Effect.” Most people prefer Pepsi over Coke in blind sipping taste tests, despite the overall greater popularity of Coke.
Taste changes over time
Our sense of taste is subjective. “You put the same thing in front of ten people, you’re gonna get ten different answers” about how it tastes, says Hartel.
Taste doesn’t only differ from one person to another. It can also depend on environmental and psychological factors, like the amount of food being tasted or the way in which it is consumed.
And it’s not just recipes that change over time, it’s our taste buds. After people reach middle age, the typically quick regeneration of our taste buds slows drastically. This leads people to have less sensitivity to taste as they get older, particularly for salty and sweet flavors.
Other factors, including certain health conditions and the use of alcohol and tobacco, can also change the way we perceive foods. Even Hershey’s founder Milton Hershey lost his sense of taste later in life due to his heavy cigar habit, leading him to develop recipes that others found questionable at best, such as beet sherbet.
The bottom line
Brad Reese’s criticism of Hershey’s caused enough of a stir that the company recently announced they would revert back to the former recipe for select products, such as their mini candy Easter eggs. Yet in the same statement, Hershey also announced an increase in research and development funding and the intention to tinker with other recipes, such as making a creamier KitKat.
But what does it mean to undo a recipe change consumers noticed, if there may have been many more changes that went unnoticed? Does any product truly have an “original” recipe? Candy development can sound like a sugary version of “the Ship of Theseus”: The philosophical question of whether something remains the same after all its components have been replaced.
If you feel like your childhood candies just don’t taste the same as they once did, there’s a combination of factors at play. But for food companies, recipe crafting is a continual process, and there’s no guarantee that any given product has remained untouched.
Hartel acknowledges that some companies are willing to go back on their recipe changes, especially once they become public knowledge. However, he adds, “once you’ve started saving money, it’s hard to go back to spending more.”
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