What the heck is Hershey’s up to now?

Did someone light a fire under Hershey’s or what? I was in the store the other day and spotted their new Single Origin collection. They sell them in big bars but also in this handy sampler bag. Single Bean Origin is the new catch phrase in the chocolate world. The idea is that the beans come from the same plantation and supposedly it creates a better flavor bar. Kinda like single malt scotch but with less alcohol and more chocolate.

Hershey’s is late to the party on this but it seem like they are making up for lost time. They basically came out with three new flavors of their version of Single Bean Origin: Sao Tome, Arriba, and Java.

Sao Tome (I can’t make the little accent marks) is a 70% dark chocolate with beans from San Tome, which is an island off of the west coast of Africa. Hence, the beans are Forastero beans. The taste is not awful. Very dark, a little bitter, but not much flavor to it. Forastero beans are not known for flavor so I’m not very surprised, but like I said, it wasn’t terrible and it didn’t have a bad aftertaste.

The Java bar is a 37% cacao milk chocolate made from Criollo beans from, yup, Java, which is in the Indonesian Islands. Criollo beans are the very best beans you can buy for flavor. Hershey’s says their Java bar is made with a “rare form of very light-colored Criollo bean”, which made me think they were talking about Porcelana Criollos but apparently those grow in South America. Prophetically, my favorite book on chocolate predicted in 2001 that “corporate giants” like Hershey may begin “using Java beans to provide a pale color in milk chocolate”.

The Java had a funny maple scent to it when I opening it. The flavor was very light and the chocolate was very slippery on the tongue. Often milk chocolate gets this sticky feeling to it, which I think has to do with particle size. But this melted such that it dissolved slowly and didn’t get sticky. I think it had more sugar than I normally like but it wasn’t bad. I think people who like milk chocolate will be happy with it. It doesn’t have any “cow” aftertaste that Hershey’s is infamous for.

The Arriba 50% dark milk chocolate bar is made from beans from Ecuador. According to my book again, the Arriba bean (forestero) has the irritating habit of failing to produce quality beans when grown anywhere outside of its native area in Ecuador. If you want it, you have to go to the mountain. Also, the Arriba bean has very short fermentation times (less than 24 hours) which means you can’t mix it in with other beans when fermenting because it will be overfermented or the other beans will be underfermented. If ever there was a bean made for single origin, this would be it.

I like this one the best. The flavor was very unique. Smokey. A little bit of bitter, a little big of sweet. The chocolate almost felt cool in my mouth. Very interesting. And from a Forestero bean, who’d a thunk it. Also, I noticed that this bar, unlike the other two did not have any vanilla in it, but then none of them had the dreaded vanillin. Good job, Hershey’s!
I had to grin reading Hershey’s label where it says:

“Specially sized to maximize your chocolate tasting. Break into piece in half, listening to the snap of the chocolate and enjoying the aroma. Savor the flavor notes and texture in two slow bites.”

The other product by Hershey’s that caught my eye was their Antioxidant Milk Chocolate. After the fiasco about CocoVia, I had to see what this was about. The first thing that caught my eye was that they actually gave the antioxidant levels! CocoVia was never so brave. There are 260 mg of flavanol antioxidants per 40g serving (that’s about 4 of those 1.5″ squares).

Now the funny thing is that Hershey’s compares this with other leading dark chocolates which have about 110 mg per serving. BUT, then you turn the package over and it talks about something called ORAC which Hershey’s explains as a measure of total antioxidant capacity. ORAC stands for Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which basically is how many free oxygen radicals can the antioxidant suck up before it gets used up. There’s lot of different kinds of antioxidant molecules so this is the best way to compare a gram of one versus a gram of another.

When you look at Hershey’s chart on the back of the bag, comparing the ORAC values, it turns out that the Hershey’s bar is only slightly higher than the leading brand. Eyeballing the chart it looks like the difference is about 5%, compared with the greater than 100% difference on the front of the bag.

What is interesting to note is that two teaspoons of cocoa has about a 25% higher ORAC value the Antioxidant Chocolate. About equivalent to 1 cup of blueberries. Maybe that’s one good reason to have chocolate milk (with real cocoa) after a run. Unless you like blueberries, which are pretty good too.

So I tried the antioxidant bar. It tasted exactly like a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar. Gritty. Sticky. Vanillin. Cow. And this funky dry, bitter after taste after about 5 minutes. If you like Hershey’s traditional milk chocolate, and want to have more antioxidants, then maybe this is your bar. I don’t see any advantage over cocoa or blueberries though. Who does Hershey think might like this bar? Take a look at their website and I think you’ll see right away.

In other news, The Chocolate Manufacturers Association is trying to change the way the FDA classifies “pure chocolate”. The CMA wants the FDA to include the use of VEGETABLE OILS! If the FDA says yes, your “chocolate bar” will have vegetable oil in it instead of cocoa butter and they will still be able to call it chocolate. Oh yes. They did this in Europe and they want to do it here. NO WAY! You can complain to the FDA about by going through Guittard’s site.

Two more items:

Nestle is buying Gerber for $5.5 Billion. What don’t those people make now?

Mars is suing Natraceutical, a Spanish chocolate company for patent infringement of its patents for polyphenol rich chocolate. The article screwed up the patent numbers. Here is one, here is the other. The case is abit more complicated than what I said here actually. But interesting to read now that I know what the heck the patents are talking about. When you write a patent it really doesn’t mean anything UNTIL someone tries to infringe. Then it all comes down to how well your patent is written. If you screwed up and wrote your claims too narrowly, or left too much out in your specification, you are sunk. Sometimes, it comes down to a single word. I’ll be interested to see how this turns out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under Chocolate Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.