HERSHEY, Pennsylvania (Michigan News Source) – The Hershey Company insists everything is “Same craft. Same care. Same REESE’S.” But if your once-reliable peanut butter–chocolate fix has suddenly started tasting stale, plasticky, waxy – or just oddly off – you may not be losing your taste buds. You may be tasting a change.
Brad Reese, who is the grandson of H.B. Reese, the inventor of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, is calling the Hershey Company to the carpet for allegedly replacing milk chocolate with compound coatings and peanut butter with peanut crème in multiple products.
In an Associated Press report, Reese explained how he had bought a bag of Reese’s Mini Hearts, only to throw them away. “It was not edible,” he said about the candies which he said were not made from milk chocolate or peanut butter, adding, “You have to understand. I used to eat a Reese’s product every day. This is very devastating for me.”
The wrapper says “peanut butter cups.” The fine print says…something else.
Reese’s fans in the UK are reportedly noticing something curious too: the front of certain packages still says “Peanut Butter Cups,” but the ingredient list tells a slightly different story. Instead of good old-fashioned milk chocolate, the label reads “Milk Chocolate Flavored Coating.” And the filling? Not simply peanut butter, but “Peanut Butter Crème Center.” That’s not just splitting hairs – that’s splitting a peanut.
Reese said in a letter he posted on his LinkedIn profile, “How does The Hershey Co. continue to position Reese’s as its flagship brand, a symbol of trust, quality and leadership, while quietly replacing the very ingredients (Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter) that built Reese’s trust in the first place?”
When penny-pinching meets peanut butter.
For nearly a century, the blueprint for a Reese’s cup was beautifully simple, as Brad Reese has often noted: real milk chocolate plus real peanut butter. No gimmicks. No mystery math. So when that formula shifts for the sake of saving money, even slightly, people notice. Taste buds don’t lie.
And many have noticed. Including this writer, who currently has a jar of mini peanut butter cups sitting untouched on the kitchen counter since Christmas – a phenomenon previously unheard of in the Isbell household. The initial assumption? They must be stale – because the familiar snap of chocolate and creamy peanut butter punch just wasn’t there. And for a candy that’s practically a household staple, “meh” simply isn’t part of the brand identity. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
What the company says.
In a company statement in response to Brad Reese’s allegations, they say, “Our iconic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are made the same way they have always been; starting with roasting fresh peanuts to make our unique, one-of-a-kind peanut cup butter that is then combined with iconic milk chocolate.”
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Although they promise the company hasn’t changed the iconic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, in the next paragraph they admit, “When developing new product lines, we have made some recipe adjustments to allow us to make new shapes, sizes, and innovations that Reese’s fans have come to love and ask for.”
That being said, Reese’s Take5 and Fast Break bars are also no longer coated with milk chocolate and white Reese’s are made with a white creme.
Candy across the pond.
The AP reported that during a conference call with investors last year, Hershey Chief Financial Officer Steven Voskuil acknowledged the company had tweaked some product formulas. He didn’t say which products were affected, but assured investors that the “taste profile and the specialness of our iconic brands” remained intact.
Consumers, however, seem less convinced. If that was the assignment, many longtime fans would argue the company failed miserably and swapped the rich, creamy indulgence of milk chocolate and peanut butter for something that tastes more like a chocolate-adjacent lab experiment than the gold standard they grew up on.
