Haven’t bought name brand Pop-Tarts in years, but have occasionally picked up Toaster 'Betes or whatever the off-brand versions are called.
Noticed a ‘sale’ on the name brand and got conned into buying them. They’re now smaller, have less frosting, and have way less filling. The damn things were so flimsy that two of them snapped trying to take them out of the toaster.
If you get a craving for some nice sugary betes for breakfast, stick to the off-brands. They’re now higher quality than the name brand.
The future is stupid.
That explains a lot. I used to live the raspberry ones so much and couldn’t wait to share them with my two girls.
All I got was, “Dad, these suck.”
So I tried one and was just baffled. It did suck. I chalked it up to my taste buds changing, but this makes much more sense.
Chocolate has gotten worse and worse too.
I’m fairly certain they stopped using actual ingredients and make all the flavors exclusively with artificial flavors now. Everything tastes like the same corn syrupy artificially flavored trash. The flavors used to actually be differentiated and taste like something besides sweetened chemical disaster.
I tried a twinkie for the first time in ages and maybe it is just a rose‑tinted memory but I swear they tasted better when I was a kid. It was really dry and the filling barely had any flavor. It was just greasy.
Cosmic brownies and oatmeal cream pies… Not good now either.
I believe I read recently that the price of cocoa beans has gotten much more expensive so chocolate producers have started using more sugar. Therefore the chocolate is lower quality.
Cacao prices went up sharply a couple-few years ago, but have gone back down the last year or two.
It’s part of why Dubai Chocolate everything was a trend. Use a fraction of the chocolate but charge a premium? Nearly every chocolate producer was all over that.
I’d rather pay more and eat less of it for real chocolate.
They have been omitting chocolate entirely from some things. There was a whole thing recently with Reese’s trying to make on of their chocolate and peanut butter candies with no real chocolate.
It doesn’t even matter if cocoa was more expensive.
They will look for any way to make it cheaper, quality be damned. 2¢ saved per candy bar looks great on an excel spreadsheet, the only thing that matters to those fucking finance bro clowns.
Course it matters. There’s a reason they weren’t already doing it.