One of the big things the website, The Consumerist, has been documenting over the last year is what they call the ‘grocery shrink-ray’ effect: food companies raising prices without actually raising them by shrinking the amount or size of the item while leaving the packaging looking the same. They’re doing this to fool customers into not realizing there’s been a change. Another aspect of the same trend is this, Hershey is replacing milk chocolate with cheaper ingredients.

The Candy Blog noticed that Hershey’s “Kissables” have been reformulated, and can no longer be legally labeled “milk chocolate” because of FDA regulations. The new package looks the same, except for the ingredients and the label which now says “Chocolate Candy” instead “Candy Coated Milk Chocolate.”

Not that this sort of thing hasn’t been going for years, but as you read the update, this is Hershey’s astonishing response: we like fake chocolate better! Does that mean real chocolate will become extinct because the fake stuff “tastes better” or because they can charge real chocolate prices for the fake stuff? Cripes!

Remember the days when processed food used real chemicals and you couldn’t tell by the label (ha, what label?) that what you were eating was killing you? You didn’t care because it tasted so damn good! Like the McD’s burger that has lasted over a decade and looks almost as if it were fresh off the griddle? Ah, good times, good times….