All the confectionary tastes soooo different nowadays

[LeaveTheSweetsAlone]

It started with them mucking about with bag sizes - fine. All is good in moderation. Bought some Haribo a while back and there was something different about it! The gummies were harder, the flavour a bit bland, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then today I bought some fruit pastilles (elite sweet which is why I’m so outraged I’ve started this thread). Again, the texture is worse - they were perfect and now they get stuck to your teeth.

I do understand it’s probably to do with reducing sugars etc etc so they’re changing the formulas BUT on the rare occasion I wanted a little something to take the edge off 😂😂😂 I’ve been met with disappointment.

Tell me I’m not the only one! Share your recent disappointing snack findings.

Also any detective MNtters fancy proving my theory that they’re changing recipes?

chocolate quality has gone down so much, even in my dcs lifetime (they’re teens.) Santa’s brought them a chocolate orange for about 10 years and it used to be scoffed before they opened the presents. This year’s was so bland dd2 gave half to me and this has never happened before. I have started buying non upf dark chocolate and a bar for about £4 can last us a week as the three of us have the odd square when we feel like it. It’s not the sort of thing you’d have a whole bar of in one go but a small piece is nice.

This year dd1 has said she’s happy to not get Easter eggs, she’ll settle for money instead.

Chocolate is horrible now. I used to get a craving for it and go to the shop to get what I fancy. Now I don’t even bother as I know it won’t work. It tastes like plastic.

Think I will start looking at M&S for chocolate treats from now on. Thanks to yourself and others for the tip.

The only other bars of chocolate I love are Ritter Sport but they are hard to come by. Lidl often stock them but not always in the flavours I like!

I buy 70% dark chocolate at Lidl and have a square every so often. It's really tasty.

Don’t understand the hype around toneys chocolate… to me it just tastes like ultra bog standard chocolate of the type you used to get in cheap advent calendars in the nineties for example. Why do people like it?

You can't win🤣

Yuck, yes look out for rapeseed oil too, another milk fat substitute 🤮 Known as canola oil in the US. Rank.

Totally agree with the pp that suggested the likes of Cadbury bring out an Original or Classic version of the original Dairy Milk for a higher price. Sure there's plenty of us that would buy it!

I haven't touched Dairy Milk in probably 10 years! They're really missing a trick!

I have found my tribe!

Yes I've pretty much given up on confectionery, used to love Fruit Pastilles or a Creme Egg - well, Creme Eggs went out the window a decade ago when Cadbury's changed it from Dairy Milk to some other (cheaper) variant of chocolate, and Rowntree's went vegan so changed the recipe. And the poor cocoa harvests in the last few years have driven up the price of all chocolates, with many manufacturers changing recipes to use cheaper ingredients because they know we'll stop buying it at the price they'd have to charge if they didn't.

My sweet treat now is Bahlsen Choco Leibniz biscuilts, but they've shot up in price from £1.25 to £2.25 (whilst reducing the number of biscuits in a pack, naturally)!

I do sometimes buy a bar of Lindt dark chocolate, especially the orange or raspberry version - I can be happy with just a square or two, so it's good value even at £3.50/bar.

On the plus side, all these recipe changes will save me from getting diabetes I suppose.

Yes, I find most offerings a bit disappointing now. Rowntrees fruit gums and opal fruits are still very nice though. Most 'chocolate' has become very oily and unpleasant. Terry's chocolate orange, Cadbury's, Hotel choc, Thornton's and even Tony's can all do one. I picked up some Divine bars on offer in Waitrose the other day, their dark choc with sour raspberry pieces, and ginger with orange pieces is very nice and not too bitter.

You have to choose very carefully. Home made or small brand ice cream is usually good, mass produced, not so much (though I do love an ice cream Snickers or Magnum).

High quality milk chocolate will be pretty good. Though I still enjoy a Dairy Milk, I have to say, so my tastes are not that refined.

I'm very fussy about cake and biscuits and only have home made or made individually in a shop and not mass produced.

I used to favour Swizzels sweets over Haribo (and they are a British company which was local to me growing up) and loved Refreshers well into my 30s but they don't hold much attraction now. I don't think they changed, I just outgrew them. Eventually!

Between shrinkflation and changing the ingredients I rarely have chocolate now. It just isn’t the same kind of treat as it used to be. I might occasionally buy Lindt chocolate as it isn’t as bad as Cadburys has become.

Don't bother IMO - very expensive, I find it tasteless, and because of the pretentious story they have decided to stick to, they have massively thick and badly spaced out bars which don't snap evenly and are impossible to bite into (I do have bad teeth to be fair).

@TwattingDog

What is their pretentious story?

Yes to this! We missed out on the big tins as I stupidly thought supermarket chocolates would be crap. How wrong I was. We ended up going through 3 large boxes of the M&S mixed chocs over Christmas. Just like old school chocolates and I will be sensible and buy 2 tins as soon as they're out again.

I love the raspberry and vanilla mushroom sweets you can get from Asda and Tesco etc. I thought Tesco had the best ones for ages, I used to love the texture. Very recently I had some from Asda and they were disgusting - really smooth, didn't have the same shape or outer coating that was a bit marshmallow-like and I was so disappointed.

Does anyone know where I can buy good ones? I used to get a small bag of them for the weekend.

I often treat myself to a bar from Anton https://www.luxurychocolateforyou.com/

Lush chocolate, make locally that makes my favourite walk even better because I can get a bar from a farm shop half way round.

If you can find it online to order I highly recommend Fazer Blue chocolate. Its made to the original recipe with fresh milk and 30% minimum cocoa and no palm oil or any other oil

Palm oil and sweeteners - just horrible. Give me pure sugar any day!

Same here. I mean, it's OK but nothing to rave about.

Yeah it's the fucking palm oil snd other cheap stuff in.
It's everywhere, all the big brands (because they are all owned by 5 companies or so).

Few years ago when visiting my native country, I bought something for DH I used to absolutely love. Gave him the "this is amazing, the best thing" speech, only for him to take a bite and just freeze. He asked me if I am sure it is the same thing. Then I took a bite and ffs. The chocolate was absolutely disgusting and ruined the rest which was still ok. The whole family tried and agreed. We tried something else and same result.

And thus ended my "this is amazing" memories of many, many sweets.
I am under 40 so it is not even THAT long they took to ruin everything.

Everything is sickly sweet. I have a sweet tooth, but even I can't tolerate the sweet things now. I make my own cakes and biscuits at home and sometimes eat walkers toffee, which is the same as it always was (nice). Lidl chocolate is good.

The only chocolate I like now is hotel chocolat. I’m not sure if they use palm oil or not but it is the only one that tastes ok to me.

We've got a lot of artisan bakers where I live and all their cakes look amazing, but they never fail to disappoint. They are so, so sweet. No matter what the flavour combinations are supposed to be (think Amalfi lemon with raspberry compote, sort of thing) all you can taste is over powering sweetness. I think younger people have developed sweeter taste buds, perhaps the American influence? Everyone older I speak to prefers a tarter tasting cake.

I KNEW IT!!!! I thought the recipe had changed and I read somewhere that they were saying no it's just everyone's imagination and they are the same as they always were. Why would the idiots to change the formula and make people notice how sickly sweet they are. I was probably one of the top ten purchasers of creme eggs in the Uk. I single handedly ploughed through probably half a million of them in my lifetime.

I havent bothered in about 10 years as I suddenly went off them. Which now I see coincides with the date of the recipe change. Well they've probably been regretting the income loss every day since then.