Hidden Food Costs
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who buys food that costs have gone up a lot this year, even if they haven’t been following the economic news.
A lot of grocery staples have gone up, and a lot of restaurants have increased the prices on their menus.
But many of the increases are less obvious.
Restaurants, for instance, have reduced portion sizes while keeping the prices the same. Others, including Noble’s Grille in Winston-Salem, switched to a la carte menu that leaves side dishes off of entree plates and instead sells them separately, a de facto entree increase of $3 or more in most cases.
In the supermarket, some companies have shrunk the size of their packages. Edy’s and other ice-cream makers, for example, reduced their cartons from 1.75 quarts to 1.5 quarts . Consumers pay the same but get only about 86 percent as much ice cream.
I realize that restaurateurs and food manufacturers have to do something to cope with higher costs. The problem I have with some of the strategies is they amount to lies and deceit by omission. When a company shrinks its package size, you don’t hear about it from them. So I have to think they hope we won’t notice, like the kid who break Mom’s favorite piece of china and squirrels away the shards to avoid getting in trouble.
“Childish” might be too mild a term for some of these sneaky strategies in the food business.
The Today show had an interesting segment about Hershey’s chocolate on Sept. 19. MSNBC.com had a report on it, too.
Hershey has yet another strategy for dealing with increased costs. This one really takes the cake for me. Today reported how Hershey’s has removed part or all of the cocoa butter from some of its chocolates and replaced it with vegetable oil.
Hershey’s is smart enough not to have done this with its iconic Hershey’s bar, Kisses or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The ingredient change does affect Kissables, Milk Duds, Krackel, Whatchamacallit and Mr. Goodbar.
According to the report, Hershey’s already has put the cocoa butter back in Almond Joy bars because people complained.
This change is significant for two reasons. First, cocoa butter supplies much of the chocolate flavor to these candies. Second, a company cannot legally call a product plain “milk chocolate” if it doesn’t have cocoa butter.
Other companies make plenty of chocolately foods that are not in fact chocolate. What is newsworthy here is that what was one day chocolate was diluted with vegetable oil, and all on the quiet.
Hershey’s did have to change its labels to comply with the law. But the changes are so small that consumers are very unlikely to notice, and I have to believe that was Hershey’s sneaky ambition all along.
Where the Kissables label used to say “milk chocolate,” it now says “chocolate candy.” Now the FDA is partly to blame for allowing such loose language, but do most people really know that “chocolate candy” is not actually chocolate?
Check out both these Kissables labels above and below and see how subtle the change is.
Other words allowed for candy that is not legally chocolate include “made with chocolate” and “chocolatey.”
Cybele May, who writes the Candy Blog, calls these vegetable-oil Hershey products “mockolate,” a term she says she first heard on an episode of the former Friends sitcom.
I wonder what Hereshey’s would think of labeling its Kissables and Mr. Goodbars “mockolate”?
