It's America's favorite chocolate bar — it's certainly my chocolate bar. But to a great
many people from other parts of the world, the Hershey Bar tastes like vomit. Not figurative
vomit, but literal, actual human sick.
My wife, Lauren, knows what I'm talking about.
"When I was in college, I worked at this camp in Pennsylvania and we took the kids to Hershey
Park. And my co-counselor, who was from New Zealand, was very excited. She tried a Hershey
Kiss, and promptly said, 'Oh my god, this tastes like vomit!'" And then she made us
eat Cadbury."
I talked about the Hershey Bar recently on my TikTok, and look at all of these comments
from people not in the U.S. And it's not just the Hershey Bar. Hershey's has been so dominant
in the U.S. market for so long that most other big chocolate brands here have to imitate
that Hershey taste to some extent. This is just what American consumers expect chocolate
to taste like — but why?
Well, the history and science that explains this is pretty interesting, and it raises
some profound questions about how we define the quality of food. Is there such a thing
as objectively good or bad food, especially when it comes to something like a dessert
— the sole function of which is to provide us with pleasure?
The reason this tastes like puke to some people and this doesn't probably has to do with the
milk, so we first have to understand how milk got into chocolate in the first place.
For virtually all of its 4,000-year history, chocolate has been a beverage. Ancient Meso-Americans
harvested cacao beans and did various things to combine them with water into a drink with
medicinal and ceremonial purposes. This may have included fermenting the cacao to make
alcohol.
Europeans got chocolate by way of the Aztecs, whom the Spanish conquered in the 16th century.
The Spaniards used it is a medicine too, which makes sense, because unsweetened cocoa totally
tastes like medicine. It is crazy bitter, but as the song goes, a spoonful of sugar
helps the medicine go down, and once somebody at the Spanish court got the bright idea to
try that, Europeans started drinking chocolate for pleasure. And at some point, they also
started pouring milk into their water-based cocoa drink the same way that people pour
it into coffee. It smooths and thickens the texture, and it rounds off the bitter flavors.
It wasn't until the 19th century that European confectioners started playing with solid chocolate
products consisting of cocoa powder (known as cocoa solids), cocoa fat (known as cocoa
butter) and sugar, and eventually milk, for the same reason they put it in the drink.
This was probably particularly advantageous for early solid chocolates, which were manufactured
by relatively crude means. We love a milk-free "dark" chocolate these days, but the original
dark chocolate was often described as gritty and harsh. Adding milk helped.
Contrary to what the Cadbury marketing illustrations would have you believe, you can't just pour
milk into solid chocolate. Milk is mostly water, which doesn't mix with fat, and confections
with high water content are hospitable to microbial life. They can mold if you don't
eat them within a few days.
The Nestlé company was born in Switzerland when Henri Nestlé figured out a process to
create dehydrated milk — powdered milk. Nestlé's neighbor, Daniel Peter, added the
powdered milk to his solid chocolate mix and the rest is history.
Up in England, Cadbury's first solid milk chocolate also used powdered milk. But chocolatiers
quickly figured out that you could make an even smoother, tastier product if you used
condensed milk rather than powdered milk — that is, milk that has a lot of its water boiled
out, but it's still a liquid.
Over in the United States, an already wealthy and successful caramel-maker named Milton
Hershey was trying to develop his own milk chocolate process. Much of what I'm about
to tell you is drawn from the journalist Michael D'Antonio's excellent biography of Hershey.
In 1903, Hershey retreated to his old family homestead in Pennsylvania and started experimenting
with milk. The first thing that he landed on was using skim milk - milk that has had
the fat removed. Milk fat would go rancid in the chocolate after awhile, and that was
not gonna work for the kind of shelf-stable, mass-produced product that Hershey envisioned.
He cooked batch after batch of milk in a giant copper vacuum pan. When you cook a liquid
in a vacuum, that lowers its boiling point, so you can drive off the water at much lower
temperatures. He still couldn't get a product he was happy with, and in desperation one
day, Hershey summoned one of his factory workers named John Schmalbach. Schmalbach tried mixing
the skim milk with sugar and then he cooked in the vacuum pan at a very low temperature
for a long time, and then when it was done cooking, he turned off the heat and then just
let it sit there and cool in the vacuum for a long time. Then they opened up the pan and
Hershey said:
"'Look at that beautiful batch of milk. How come you didn't burn it? You didn't go to
college.'"
Out of context that remark seems way more rude than it probably actually was, because
just before this, Hershey had indeed invited a fancy college chemist to his lab to try
to make a batch of milk, and the chemist did, in fact, burn that batch of milk. But anyway,
Hershey and his guys made a batch of chocolate with Schmalbach's milk, and he thought it
was perfect. The chocolate had a snap to it — like al dente pasta, it was smooth, it
was shelf-stable, and it was better suited to mass production. Condensed milk you can
flow through systems of pipes. You can't do that with powdered milk.
It may indeed have tasted a little like sick, but Hershey had had found a money-saving product
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Now back to vomit chocolate. The thing about the low-temperature reduction process that
John Schmalbach had invented for Hershey is that it soured the milk.
Hershey's recipe is, of course, a closely-guarded trade secret, but chocolate experts these
days are generally in agreement that the sour taste in Hershey's is butyric acid — butter
acid. They create it by lipolyzing or breaking down the fat content in the milk. And butyric
acid may very well have been what made that 1903 catch of milk taste sour too. One way
to make butyric acid is through anaerobic fermentation. Remember, they were were doing
it in a vacuum pan — anaerobic.
Butyric acid is also created in our digestive systems, and in the even that the contents
of our digestive systems leave, we are then exposed to that signature twang — that smell,
that taste of butyric acid. This is probably why
People who didn't grow up eating this stuff think this tastes like sick. For me, who did
grow up eating this stuff, it's very different because I've eaten Hershey's chocolate way
more often than I've thrown up, thankfully. Therefore, to me, butyric acid tastes like
chocolate, not sick.
And when I go to the British import section of my local grocery store and pick up some
goodies — damn, no Aero bars today — I am usually struck by how this chocolate tastes
flat to me. Dull. It lacks the acidity that I've been conditioned to expect.
And British chocolate in particular tends to taste kinda fatty to me. Indeed, Cadbury
uses vegetable oils in addition to cocoa butter. That may contribute to the smoother, creamier
texture Cadbury has relative to Hershey's, but that could be a lot of things. The churning,
the tempering, lots of things. Certainly Cadbury lovers really value the comparatively creamy
texture. I should acknowledge that this particular bar is the American version of Cadbury Dairy
Milk, which is, ironically, distributed and partially manufactured by Hershey's, and the
recipe has been adjusted a bit for the U.S. market. It has no vegetable oil in it, because
that's not legally allowed in a U.S. product that's labeled as chocolate. It still tastes
very different from a Hershey Bar.
Hershey-haters often describe the texture of this as waxy by comparison to this. But
you know what? I kinda like that. Cocoa butter goes very waxy when you get it cold, as anyone
who has had chocolate chip ice cream can tell you, and I keep my chocolate bars in the fridge.
I love that snap of waxy cocoa butter.
In 2015, the BBC did a fun little focus group to analyze the difference between Hershey's
and Cadbury, and that strikes me as a fair comparison. They're both inexpensive, mass-produced,
mass-market chocolates. It would be absurd to put a Hershey bar up against a fine, hand-crafted
European chocolate.
The adult focus groups preferred Cadbury — they described the Hershey's as "harder", "more
bitter", "not as rich."
Interestingly though, when the Beeb asked British kids which chocolate they liked, the
kids were more likely to choose the Hershey bar.
"I think this one's better."
Now some of you are probably thinking right now, "Of course the kids like the Hershey
bar better — the Hershey bar's got way more sugar!"
Not really, though. The BBC investigation found that widespread belief is chiefly the
result of different labeling regulations in the U.K. vs the U.S. Cadbury and Hershey have
about the same proportion of sugar. It's just that milk just comes higher on the Cadbury
ingredients list because the Brits rank the milk based on its liquid weight, not its evaporated
weight.
It may indeed be the case that the Hershey bar has proportionally less cocoa in it. If
you look at the U.S. and E.U. regulations on the minimum cocoa content of chocolate,
it looks like the E.U. standard is higher. Yes, the U.K. isn't a member of the E.U. anymore
but they're generally still operating under those old rules. The E.U. standard for the
minimum cocoa content of milk chocolate is higher, but the European standard is for dry
cocoa solids, whereas the U.S. standard is for "chocolate liquor," which is a wet product,
so these are probably apples and oranges numbers. I don't really know how to interpret this.
I do know a Hershey spokesman told the BBC that Hershey's contains 30% cocoa solids.
If true, that'd be higher than the 23% that Cadbury claims for their own product, through
he's probably talking about the U.K. version of the Hershey bar which is a slightly different
recipe.
But it's certainly the case that a Hershey bar has way less cocoa in it than a fine European
dark chocolate bar. I mean, just look at it. Cocoa is very expensive, and it's got a very
intense flavor — both of those things are bad for mass-market chocolate. So if this
doesn't have much cocoa in it, does that mean that the Hershey bar is an objectively inferior
product?
Certainly a lot of people on my TikTok tried to make that argument. Cocoa is the defining
ingredient of chocolate, so chocolate with less cocoa is objectively lesser chocolate
— because it's less chocolate.
Interesting argument. Certainly you would reach a point where the proportion of the
cocoa was so low that the product would be utterly unrecognizable as chocolate. Some
might argue that this has gone well below that point. But what if we extended that logic
in the opposite direction? This logic implies that the finest chocolate bar in the world
is the one that has the highest proportion of cocoa. And you know what? I happen to have
some of that right here. It's called unsweetened baking chocolate. You ever just eaten some
of this?
Yeah, eat that and you will be immediately reminded why people started putting other
stuff in their chocolate.
You could argue that alcohol is the defining ingredient of a spirit, right? And if we apply
our chocolate logic to booze, that means that pure ethanol is a superior beverage to fine
Scotch whisky, which has all kinds of other things in it besides ethanol. And wine has
even less alcohol in it that whisky. Does that mean that whisky is objectively superior
to wine?
OK, now you might say, forget the cocoa percentages. Hershey bars are objectively bad because they
taste like human vomit. We are evolved to find certain tastes and smells repulsive because
they are indicative of substances that are dangerous to us. We are evolved to be repulsed
by butyric acid, and therefore a food that contains butyric acid is a violation of natural
law!
Well, I happen to be a fan of violating what a lot of people regard as natural laws, and
a lot of the world's great foods are great because they ride the line between enticement
and revulsion. Europeans generally love fermented milk products — think of all the stinky
cheeses they dig, and guess what — parmesan has butyric acid in it too.
Certainly you could argue that food can be objectively bad from a nourishment standpoint,
but even that would depend on the subjective dietary needs of the individual, and that
whole line of inquiry is moot when it comes to a dessert — when it comes to candy, that
has no nutritional purpose. It's purely for pleasure, and I derive a lot of pleasure from
eating this, not the least because I grew up with it.
Candy, more than anything else, is wrapped up in childhood memory, right? I grew up in
central Pennsylvania, not far form where Milton Hershey lived. There's an amusement park there
called Hershey Park. Every summer my parents would take me there to ride the roller coasters,
and on the way out they would buy me a giant novelty Hershey Kiss, and I would slowly nibble
away on that all summer long.
Those warm feelings are half of what I'm tasting when I'm tasting this, and I bet that you
could think of a food that you could eat that would take you right to a very happy place
in your life. In my moral code, anything that brings you pleasure is great, so long as it
doesn't come at the particular expense of anybody else, or at the particular expensive
of your longterm pleasure-experiencing capacity. So take your pleasure where you find it — I'll
do the same.