If you went trick-or-treating in the 1990s and early 2000s, you probably noticed something: The candy tasted better back then. You’re not imagining it. It’s not that the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia are deceiving you. This doesn’t mean your taste buds have “evolved.” Today’s candy literally tastes like hot garbage. That’s because it is.
Take Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, for example. Despite claims that its “classic recipe” hasn’t changed, it has. Anyone who has eaten them in the past two to thirty years can tell you this through the taste. But we have evidence.
In the 1960s, Hershey’s added glucose to the formula. In the 1980s, the industrial-grade preservatives tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) and citric acid were added. By 2006, Hershey’s added polyglyceryl polyricinoleate (PGPR), an emulsifier known to change the consistency of chocolate.
Snickers has also changed a lot. This beloved treat once contained malted milk and sweetened condensed milk, but that no longer exists. Now it’s full of palm oil and “artificial flavors.” In 2019, the company also admitted to reducing the amount of chocolate used in its candy bars.
It seems that as opposed to straight-up shrink-and-swell, some products, like Reese’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Mini Hearts Unwrapped, take a more circuitous route, consisting primarily of sugar and seed oil, with 2% or less cocoa content. Chocolate candy with almost no chocolate? Why even bother calling it chocolate? But things are only going to get worse.
Several of the world’s largest chocolate makers have partnered with companies developing lab-grown cocoa or chocolate alternatives. Mondelēz, Lindt and Puratos are investing in lab-grown chocolate, while Mars, Nestle, Cargill and Barry Callebaut are working with companies developing cocoa-free alternatives to chocolate. Some of these products are already on the shelves. The manufacturer expects other products to be commercially available by the end of 2026.
But the question is, why? Why spend years deliberately making a poor product?
These companies will tell you they are saving the planet. Sustainable development, innovation, environmental responsibility. They have an entire vocabulary dedicated to making their business decisions sound like acts of charity while they cut down and burn another palm oil grove.
But among all that sweet corporate altruism, there’s obviously not another word :pprofit. Because while marketing departments wax poetic about sustainability, manufacturers themselves tout lower production costs, cheaper ingredients and immunity from the fluctuations in cocoa prices. That’s the real motivation.
So what do you do when a company decides that its profits are more important than the health and well-being of your children? Play the game better.
Every dollar is a vote
Many moms I’ve spoken to personally this year agree. They cannot in good conscience feed their children product Rather than real food.
Partly because these mothers refused to accept the family status quo, the market for health-conscious consumers expanded rapidly. While not all options are perfect, they are significantly better than the alternatives.
For chocolate, MrBeast Feastables is a great choice. The brand’s current milk chocolate bars contain sugar, whole milk powder, cocoa butter, sugar-free chocolate, soy lecithin and natural vanilla extract. So, no seed oils, no artificial flavors, no ingredients you can’t pronounce, and nothing with a number attached to the name.
Unreal offers great alternatives to Reese’s, M&M’s, and Almond Joy, and if you like organic ingredients, Justin’s is a great alternative to Reese’s.
For lovers of soft and hard candies, Solely, YumEarth and SmartSweets are all great options.
Of course, there’s one problem: price. It’s one thing to buy quality candy for your kids. Buying enough for an entire community is another.
But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on the tradition entirely. You can still give them the magic of Halloween without giving them all the take-home stuff in a goody bag.
That’s what I and several other moms I’ve spoken to have done this year. We still take our kids trick-or-treating, and we still don’t give them candy. But at night, the candy our children collected would be put into buckets and given to the elderly who were still trick-or-treating. One mom I spoke to even came up with the clever idea of letting her son trade his Halloween harvest for stuffed animals.
Our kids still eat candy on Halloween night. It’s just the candies we choose for them and the treats we make ourselves.
horror night
Growing up, I remember urban legends about razor blades hidden in caramel apples and shards of glass hidden in unwrapped candy. These are the things our parents warned us, the things we watch out for, even though no one we know has ever received a razor blade on Halloween night, let alone a whole caramel apple.
But Halloween is different now. We might still double-check for evidence of tampering before giving candy back to kids, but what if the real threat was never the glass and the blades? What if this wasn’t one lone rogue actor, but an entire industry of multi-billion dollar corporations constantly looking for ways to line their own pockets at the expense of children’s health?
What if the scariest part of Halloween wasn’t the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins, but the costume makers stuffing them with candy? Today’s candy is forced to pretend to be food, but in reality it’s just an amorphous mixture of solvent-derived oils, petroleum-derived dyes, and industrial preservatives.
What if the scariest aspect of Halloween was that monsters no longer had to sneak dangerous candy into our children’s bags? We put it there ourselves.
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Alicia Bittle is a mother of five whose work focuses on the intersections of family, faith, and culture. She also writes for Evie magazine.
This article is part of Upstream, The Telegraph’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insights and human stories—from our featured writers to you.