Actually, you can blame that on the founder. He was trying to copy the heavily guarded milk chocolate making process from Europe by using food scientists. The guy who managed to make him a chocolate bar was like "oops, I messed up and soured the milk, but that is easily fixable" and the founder decided that the sour taste would make the chocolate bar stand out in the market. As if undercutting the imported chocolate price by a huge amount wouldn't.
This is all horse shit. Hershey was solving a different problem, they had more challenging logistics when trying to keep dairy fresh. Hershey needed a more stable form of milk and a byproduct of that process was butyric acid.
That's not what happened. Chocolate was a drink for basically all of humanity and you drank it a lot like coffee which included putting milk into it.
Then in the 1800s people started to experiment with making solid chocolate out of cocoa butter. But you still need to put milk in because without it chocolate tastes awful. But the problem was that milk spoils so you couldn't make it shelf stable. But then people tried making it with powdered milk which worked well enough. Then Nestle came up with the idea to use condensed milk which worked even better and started selling the first mass produced, commercial chocolates (it was actually Nestle's neighbor that made the chocolates and Nestle just provided the milk, but that's not super important to this particular conversation). Then Hershey was trying to find a cheaper way to make shelf stable chocolate, and one of his workers came up with the idea to cook it low and slow for a long time, which broke down the fat and worked for exactly what Hershey was going for. Which also produced Butyric acid which gave the chocolate a tangy flavor, but it also gave a much snappier texture which is something that people generally like in a chocolate bar.
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u/shave_your_eyebrows Shave Your Eyebrows 7h ago
Erm I actually DO know why it tastes like vomit, Hershey puts vomit chemical in their stupid chocolate that I hate for no reason
You Americans need to eat Milka or somethin