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Chiara Cecchini is Vice President of Commercialization at Savor, a company that creates sustainable fats and oils directly from carbon. Opinions are the author’s own.
Earlier this month, Brad Reese, the grandson of the man who invented the peanut butter cup, bit into Reese’s Valentine’s Day heart and posted an open letter to Hershey. He said that chocolate coating is no longer chocolate. The taste was cheap. The taste was wrong.
Within days, the story was everywhere. Not because the candy heiress was upset, but because millions of people recognized the feeling. That quiet moment when the taste of the food you’ve eaten your whole life changes, and no one tells you why.
Chiara Cecchini, Vice President of Commercialization at Savor
Permission granted by Savor
Hershey has replaced milk chocolate for composite coatings on several seasonal products. The move is almost certainly in response to a 400% surge in cocoa prices over the past decade. Climate-induced drought has devastated harvests across West Africa, where most of the world’s supply is grown. The company said the classic Reese’s Cup itself has not changed. That may be true. But the anger wasn’t really about one product. It felt like I was quietly being deceived by something familiar.
This keeps happening. And it’s never quite what we think.
In 2016, Toblerone widened the gap between its iconic chocolate peaks to save weight as ingredient costs rose. It was more popular on Twitter than any other topic except the US presidential election. People called it “austerity Toblerone.” No one was talking about the cocoa supply chain.
As successive droughts in Brazil and Vietnam decimated coffee production, even premium brands quietly replaced Arabica with cheaper Robusta beans on their labels. Lab tests revealed what taste buds already suspected, and consumers accused corporate greed. The harvest failure that forced the switch prompted little conversation.
Bordeaux has quietly approved six grape varieties previously banned from blending as rising temperatures cause traditional grapes to produce unbalanced wines. The sommelier announces. Consumers blame winemakers.
We live in a time when climate change is not a dramatic event that most people can point to, but a slow deterioration of the things they love. A bit tasteless chocolate. A wine that has lost its freshness. Coffee like never before. The changes are small enough to be noticed, but difficult to explain, and in the absence of explanations we end up with the most plausible story. It means that the company has become greedy.
The stories are almost always wrong or at best incomplete. A more accurate version is that it is more difficult to sit down. The ingredients your grandmother used, the tastes you grew up with, the products you thought would never change — they’re changing because the agricultural systems that produced them are under stress that isn’t going away.
This is, in a sense, an anthropological phenomenon. Climate change has been discussed for decades as a matter of science, policy, and politics. But for most people this is not available in parts per million carbon figures or IPCC reports. It arrives as a broken promise from the brand. Changed taste. Prices soared. Smaller package. We process the chaos of our planet through the most intimate lens available to us: what we eat.
So the anger is real, but misdirected. Collectively, we are mourning changes we do not fully understand by blaming the closest visible actors. Companies become agents of system-level failures that were not created by any single company.
The harder question is what comes next.
When key ingredients become unreliable, every company in the food industry faces the same cruel trilemma. Raise prices and lose customers, cut portions and hope no one notices, or quietly substitute and hope the taste stays. This is not a good option, but it is the only option available within a system built on the assumption that agricultural inputs will remain stable and cheap.
Well, that assumption has been broken. Cocoa is making headlines today, but the same dynamics are at work with fats and oils. Fats and oils account for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to every car on the road. The price of butter, along with coconut oil and palm oil, has more than doubled in the past decade. Not to mention how palm oil carries well-documented environmental and human rights risks that make sourcing increasingly complex.
The ingredients that add richness, texture and flavor to food are simultaneously becoming more expensive, less predictable and more difficult to produce ethically.
The food industry has spent generations excelling at optimizing within inherited systems. What no individual company can do alone is to build an alternative to the system itself. The work is starting, but none of us have yet reached the scale the world needs.
The question Reese’s backlash is really asking isn’t “Why did Hershey change the recipe?” The question is whether the food system can move fast enough to provide businesses with better choices before the next ingredient fails.
Peanut butter eggs are small things. That is not what it represents. And until we start to see these moments as climate symptoms rather than corporate betrayals, we will continue to have false arguments while the real problems grow.
