Chocolate Candy Becoming A Bitter Pill To Swallow Due To Worldwide Cocoa Shortage

A descendant of the Reese’s chocolate family was the wrong guy to try to sell fake candy to.

Brad Reese, whose name you’ll associate with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, ran into a Florida convenience store last month and grabbed a bag of Reese’s Valentine’s candy.

Once he threw a few pieces into his mouth, Reese says, “I took two bites and had to spit it out,” reports TheGuardian.com.

Reese is a Reese’s aficionado who makes a point of trying everything the company produces. This isn’t a coincidence: he’s one of the Reeses, a grandson of HB Reese, the former Hershey dairy farmer who invented the peanut butter cup in 1928.

So he’s a proud defender of the Reese brand and its legacy, even still, at age 70.

But Reese knew as soon as he bit into those Peanut Butter Creme Mini Hearts there was something terribly wrong.

He was smart enough to then take a look at the ingredients on the package.

Reese noticed that instead of milk chocolate, the mini hearts were covered in a chocolate-flavored coating that was mostly sugar and vegetable oil; the list of ingredients contained a disclaimer that the candy contained less than 2% cocoa.

He visited the candy aisle at a nearby supermarket to investigate further and found that several other Reese’s and Hershey products, including Mr. Goodbar and Heath bars also lacked milk chocolate.

Reese sent an open letter on LinkedIn to Reese’s officials, who didn’t respond. But, because of Brad Reese’s ancestry, the press took notice and he got invited on a podcast to air his discovery.

The problem that chocolatiers apparently don’t want to talk about is that due to a cocoa shortage worldwide, they’re making up for it with other ingredients that simply taste, well, bitter.

Brad Reese’s relatives put out a statement saying they don’t share Brad’s criticisms.

The Reese company, now owned by Hershey, defended the integrity of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, saying they are still made with milk chocolate and peanut butter as they’ve always been.

Hershey officials acknowledged a certain amount of experimentation with some of its other products, however.

Chocolate companies “are replacing cocoa with other types of things, like more milk or more almonds or other types of coatings,” says Alexis Villacis, an economist at the Ohio State University who studies the chocolate industry.

The cocoa shortage is due to environmental challenges across the globe, experts say.

Candy companies figured eventually people would realize nothing else tastes like good old-fashioned chocolate – that they were substituting ingredients.

But little did Reese’s officials expect to be outed by a guy named Brad Reese who simply needed a quick chocolate fix but ended up with nothing but sugar and vegetable oil.