That's probably just your taste buds dulling with age, I have the same experience, many things I couldn't get enough of as kid now tastes bland (and not just prepackaged food. It's particularly noticable with sweets.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/05/526750174/wh...

The quality has definitely dropped.

There have been discrete points where I would buy a Reese's peanut butter cup and go "Yuck!". We're currently in such a phase right now where I won't buy them anymore.

I really notice when they tamper with the peanut butter. But there have been a couple of times where they over-sugared the chocolate.

Normally, I would have blown it off as "getting old" except that I mentioned that I wouldn't buy one anymore and two children (14 and 10) agreed that they started sucking that year.

Yeah, peanuts really show the quality difference. Half of the fun size Snickers I’ve gotten the past few years have tasted straight up rancid.

I swear Twix used to be much better. I haven't been meticulously tracking it over the years or anything, but there is a simple logic that if you can cut costs by making something worse, and there's pretty much no higher-quality alternative, it'll probably still sell.

The "fun sized" versions of candy generally given out at Halloween always tasted stale to me, likely due to the production and distribution methods for the holiday. I wouldn't use those to draw conclusions.

More likely they were actually stale, lots of people buy a big stash of candy and hand it out over several years until it runs out.

nobody does this. Keeps halloween candy between years? why? there's no advantage to having a "big stash". halloween candy decomposes into empty wrappers naturally anyways. It has a half life of 9 days.

After Halloween specials on candy are amazing. Theoretically, people could just always buy those deals and save them for the next year. That holds for all after season items.

If you were buying winter tires sure but Halloween candy is on sale every year and the cost for most homes is negligible so it's unlikely people are stockpiling it

This is a perfect strategy for buying clothes, but candies? nobody stores candies this long :)

There’s no advantage to a big stash, but it’s easy to overestimate the number of trick-or-treaters, have a ton of candy left on your hands, and just stick it in the closet for next year.

No it's not

They were stale, but even freshly purchased ones are often stale. Candy goes stale faster than you'd think, and seasonal candy often sits around longer and is stored with less care than a regular candy bar.

They probably are a little more stale than the large bars because many are in the unsealed paper wrappers.

The only one that's as good as I remember from childhood is Kinder eggs. That chocolate is amazing and waaaay better than we deserved as kids. Still get one for xmas every year although could do without the plastic toy.

Funnily enough I've always thought Kinder chocolate was way too sweet (even as a kid) and I remember being flummoxed by the tagline of Kinder ads (in Italy, but that's where they're from), which was "more milk, less cocoa". Kid me was thinking: "wait! Isn't milk way cheaper than and less delicious than cocoa?". But then again it was probably aimed at health conscious parents...

Is cocoa bad for you? It’s the milk and the sugar that are unhealthy, as far as I know.

Cocoa is pretty fat and (at least in Italy) there is a popular belief that it might cause acne.

I think it's also interesting to note that Nutella (also from Ferrero) has a history of being a post-WW2 pure chocolate substitute at a time when hazelnuts were much cheaper and easier to source. It seems to be in the company's DNA to produce chocolate-based confections while touting chocolate as the bad guy.

Cocoa powder is just fat and carbs with basically no other nutritional content but it's not really any worse for you than other sources of the same thing.

The milk is probably the most nutritionally rich thing in your average chocolate bar.

Kinder eggs are European chocolate, aren't they? European chocolate is much higher quality than the American counterpart, so maybe that would explain?

There isn't a European counterpart to American milk chocolate (which mostly tastes like Hershey's) is there? Like, the reason they are different isn't quality, it's that they are different.

Or have you sampled American chocolates that do not try to follow Hershey's flavor and found that they are all inferior?

AFAIK, In Europe the minimum cocoa content for chocolate is 20% while 10% in the US. The US mainstream chocolate handles the lacking cocoa by adding more sugar. Of course you'll find all kinds of boutique chocolates everywhere, but the earlier anecdotes seemed to be about the cheap mainstream stuff.