This is a surreal thread, I always loved kisses, didn’t know they were hated apparently? Is this like a DNA thing where some people taste it bad and others taste it good?
US chocolate includes butyric acid which has a kind of vomit taste. It seems to be a preservative decision that originates from earlier days that has remained.
Shit. This explains why some of the store bought lasagne and partisan you can buy in Aus has such a strong smell of vomit. Some are great. Others make you reconsider life decisions.
Hersheys in particular uses soured milk to get that particular acidity, creating a dissonant flavour some seem to like, but it does taste terrible. I’ve sworn off the mass produced US brands for most things as possible, so neither Hersheys (worst), nor Nestle, nor Mars are to the standard of actual chocolate flavour or consistency. As a former patisserie, we always imported chocolate for confections from the EU, and honestly Japan’s mass produced chocolate brands are by far superior to the US.
More specifically it was added to the chocolate in MRE's for use during WWII which for a lot of the soldiers led to them wanting it back home to taste the same. Basically they wanted milk chocolate but the milk would spoil so they add the acid to prevent it from spoiling. Kind of similar to how cigarettes were in those same MRE's and led to a lot of smoking...
Hershey classic recipe chocolate has that, not all of their chocolate even has it.
Other US chocolate brands do not have it and have never used it.
Some of the chocolates people claim have the vomit taste aren't even manufactured or owned by a US company, I've seen people talk about some with the vomit taste that were owned and made by Nestlé.
Buttic acid is in Hershey's chocolate which is a component in vomit, but I honestly don't taste it. Probably from growing up with it. To me it just has a very slight cheesey bite
Yeah it's just my insanely bad pixel 10 autocorrect being a dick like always. I'm sure I misspelled it that way in the past at some point and it's remembered it as the correct spelling
It’s not about Kisses, it’s about American chocolate. It does taste off to most non-Americans. I don’t get the vomit taste personally but there’s something funky about it for sure
AMERICAN Hershey’s. Canadian doesn’t taste like that. And Hershey’s owns production rights over most mass produced chocolates in America, so a good majority of them taste like that.
I don't know all the legal stuff but I know Hershey's manufactures KitKats in the US (which are made by Nestle elsewhere), and I think Cadbury chocolate too. I've had KitKats sent to me by my friends in Canada and they were very different chocolate. But they definitely don't manufacture all chocolate.
Chocolate, and confectionery in general, is (relatively) cheap to produce, but setting up production is expensive. Importing is also very expensive, so utilising existing factories is often a no go as well.
What happens is that brands will work out a deal with an established brand to produce their confections, slap their logos on them, and send them out to market. This ends up meaning that a lot of the actual chocolate is produced in the same factory with the same recipe.
Cadbury's and Nestle for example use them for a lot of their chocolates, meaning a KitKat in the EU tastes completely different to a KitKat in the US.
There are benefits to this outside of money as well. Hershey's is already the most popular chocolate in the US, using their chocolate when making your confections means its already adjusted to the American palate.
Lol eww you guys must have terrible chocolate cuz you're actually eating hershey's?! That's arguably the absolute worst chocolate. America has no taste buds so we don't count. And we have no shame. So we don't count. But you guys? I thought you were better than that.
Hershey’s in Canada is a different formula due to different manufacturing standards. I’d argue it’s better. You’re basing your opinion off the American formula
You’ve got to be trolling. I don’t eat exclusively American chocolate lol, I actually prefer dark chocolate so I only eat it when it’s made avalible, like at my office
?? People just eat what's there, and if it doesn't taste like vomit like it does in the States people aren't gonna think about it lol. Why would Canadian's know the American version of the chocolate tastes bad if the Canadian version is fine?
It's butyric acid, which is also found in vomit. It's a byproduct of how Hershey's specifically (not all American chocolate) manages their milk. Most European chocolates will use dried milk or combine the milk and sugar into a concentrated product to preserve it. Hershey's wanted to use fresh milk, so they came up with a process that uses natural enzymes to partially break down the milk fat. One of the byproducts of this process is butyric acid. There's nothing weird or wrong with said acid, and a lot of people greatly appreciate the flavor it adds to the chocolate. Some people cannot separate the slight smell/taste it imparts as they are too immediately reminded of vomit. As an American, I've yet to meet anyone personally in real life for whom this is even slightly an issue, but online we are often informed by our European friends that this is actually intolerable.
Slight correction. If I remember right, it's a wartime change that carried over after. Milk was rationed, and fresh milk hard to come by. So Hershey's patented a process for using spoiled milk, which has that acid in it. After the war when milk was common again, people complained that it tasted different, so they add it back in now to make it taste "American".
It's yet another war time temporary measure that was anything but temporary.
That is a widespread story but it's just a story. The butyric acid was present in Hershey's original chocolate around 1900, predating both world wars. Hershey's did make some special wartime rations for the military in WW2 but it is decidedly not the origin of the butyric acid.
American Chocolates used to taste better when I was a kid. The corporate enshitification of what were once good products is ruining everything, including sweets.
It's a matter of getting used to it. We get American chocolate from childhood and we don't know what to compare it to, so we pretty much just accept it as it is.
But then other people get the good stuff growing up and then they taste the American stuff and are like "what the fuck?"
It's kind of like how Afghan desserts are shit. I'm Afghan, but mostly grew up in the US.
Afghans love "firney" and "jillabee" and whatever our word is for batclava or that weird "cake"? Cookie? I despite that stuff. Even "roht" is bleh (it's some kind of sweet hard bread. Not terrible, but not good).
Not to say that all the food is terrible. Our meatballs (kofta) and rice are superior to that of many other cultures. But the desserts are absolute shit. Afghans have nothing that can compete with ice cream cake. Or crunch bars. Or Kitkats. And so on. Even with our weird chemicals that make it inferior to European chocolate.
But afghans will believe their desserts are great. Because they haven't been able to compare it to superior stuff.
The idea that Americans “don’t have anything to compare it to” is dumb, as if we all have nothing but Hershey’s chocolate for our whole lives. I’ve had ridiculously fancy chocolates as well as dirt cheap chocolates, from all parts of the world, and I can tell you I don’t taste Hershey’s as vomit-like.
It may be I guess an acquired taste, or being accustomed to it, but the idea that it’s because we’ve only ever eaten Hershey bars, wonder bread, etc. are just European elitism.
I mean, from the age of 3-13 I mostly just ate the shit stuff, I had already formed an idea of what chocolate tasted like when I had my first actual piece of real chocolate
The Cadburys chocolate you can buy in most places in the US just a Cadburys label on chocolate manufactured by Hersheys, and has same acidic/tangy undertone to suit American tastes. Many other popular US chocolate brands do it because it's what Americans expect from chocolate too.
You cannot conceive of the disgust I felt when I first thought I had encountered Cadburys chocolate in the US, knowing what it was supposed to taste like, only to be blasted with earwax.
If you want to taste actual Cadburys (which is also not great these days) you actually have to find somewhere that imports it.
American chocolate legit tastes like chemicals. Go to an actual, like REAL chocolate store, and it's gonna taste miles different, almost healthy compared to trash bin shit like Hersheys.
I think it’s the fact that everyone gets used to how things taste in their home country.
For example, I grew up on the US/Mexico border on the America side in El Paso. I mostly ate American chips and thought they were great. When I got a little older, the local superette started selling Mexican chips instead, and I thought they tasted like stale garbage.
By high school, I knew a guy who sold Mexican chips to folks in my class, and I noticed that people who grew up and/or spent significant time in Mexico vastly preferred the Mexican chips over the American ones, while kids like me who hasn’t eaten them very frequently and knew the American chips better couldn’t stand the Mexican ones.
The recipes are different (I believe the Mexican chips have fewer additives), but I think it’s really down to what you’re used to, like how folks who grew up in my region have a high spice tolerance, but to a different sort of spice than what you’d find in Asia. We’re not all that different on the inside (though there are genetic factors that can determine things like whether or not you think cilantro is soapy), we just grew up eating different things.
Pure indoctrination, give young kids shit chocolate they don't notice that it's shit when they grow up.
I suspect this is the same for a lot of big American products just due to how much money is in shares of food companies and the way subsidies have been granted.
Settle down, it's an acquired taste. It was introduced to increase shelf life decades ago.
Plenty of foods have butyric acid - I agree that chocolate tastes better elsewhere, but most bitter flavors require exposure and toleration... did you like your first cup of coffee?
I don't really like the taste of coffee, I'll have a shot of expresso in something on occasion but I mostly drink tea as a hot drink.
I'm probably somewhat unusual in my tolerance for chemically bitter produces, I don't like artificially ripened tomatoes or most BBQ sauces for example.
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u/Dillo64 6h ago
This is a surreal thread, I always loved kisses, didn’t know they were hated apparently? Is this like a DNA thing where some people taste it bad and others taste it good?