Just before Valentine’s Day, Brad Reese bought a bag of Reese’s Unwrapped Peanut Butter Creme Mini Hearts from his local convenience store in West Palm Beach, Florida. It was a brand-new product, released especially for the holiday, tagline: “We’ll never break your heart.”

Reese is a Reese’s aficionado who makes a point of trying everything the company produces. This isn’t a coincidence: he’s one of the Reeses, a grandson of HB Reese, the former Hershey dairy farmer who invented the peanut butter cup in 1928. Although he’s never worked for Reese’s or Hershey, which acquired the peanut butter cup company in 1963, Reese considers himself a custodian of HB’s legacy. He also takes an avid interest in the Hershey company and its leadership.

The Unwrapped Peanut Butter Creme Mini Hearts proved to be a disappointment. “I took two bites and I had to spit it out,” Reese says. “I’ve never had that happen to me, ever, in the 70 years of my life. There was no taste. It was inedible.”

Reese took a closer look at the packaging, specifically the ingredients. He noticed that instead of milk chocolate, the mini hearts were covered in a chocolate-flavored coating that was mostly sugar and vegetable oil; the list of ingredients contained a disclaimer that the candy contained less than 2% cocoa. He visited the candy aisle at a nearby supermarket to investigate further and found that several other Reese’s and Hershey products, including Take 5, Mr Goodbar, and Heath bars, also lacked milk chocolate.

Cocoa, obviously, is the central ingredient in chocolate. It’s a complex food that, on its own, tastes almost bitter. Since humans began eating it, they’ve combined it with other ingredients, such as cinnamon and chilis, to make it more palatable. Hershey, Reese’s, and other commercial chocolate companies use sugar, milk and oil. For Reese, the extras had finally overshadowed the bittersweetness of the cocoa.

Incensed, and also a little depressed, Reese went on LinkedIn and wrote an open letter to Todd Scott, the manager of corporate brand and editorial at Hershey, to complain. “How does the Hershey Company 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?” he wrote.

Scott did not respond directly, but, because of Reese’s ancestry, the press took notice. MrBeast invited Reese on to his YouTube channel to try his own Feastables brand of peanut butter cup. The Hershey company did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment, but has put out a pair of statements about Reese’s statements, one from the Reese family about how most of HB Reese’s descendants didn’t share Brad’s criticisms, and another defending the integrity of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which are still made with milk chocolate and peanut butter as they’ve always been, while acknowledging a certain amount of experimentation in other shapes and products.

“Hershey’s has been blaming cocoa bean volatility,” says Reese. “They’re squeezing every last penny they possibly can.”

The volatile cocoa market is, in fact, a major factor in chocolate pricing. Since 2020, the climate crisis has led to a cycle of droughts and floods in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which, combined, produce 70% of the world’s chocolate. This led to diseases that destroyed the cocoa plantations and decimated the cocoa supply, says Alexis Villacis, an economist at the Ohio State University who studies the chocolate industry. (Like Reese, Villacis comes from a chocolate family: his grandparents were cocoa farmers in Ecuador.)

The demand for chocolate, though, has only increased. Our society, as Villacis notes, has been built around chocolate. It’s become essential to holiday celebrations including Halloween, Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s. It’s marketed as the ultimate cheap luxury, something to brighten up a dreary time, and seasonal sales have continued to grow in spite of the rise of GLP-1s and healthier lifestyles. Limited supply and greater demand led to higher prices: by 2024 cocoa had risen from $2,000-3,000 per ton to $12,000. “In my years in this industry, I’ve never witnessed a cocoa market quite like the one we’re experiencing today,” Mark Taylor, Hershey’s senior director of strategic sourcing, wrote on the company’s website in April 2025.

This led to a conundrum at Hershey’s. The company, like its British counterparts Cadbury and Rowntree’s, was founded to produce inexpensive chocolate for the masses: the original Reese’s Cup sold for a penny (also now extinct). In order to keep prices low, large chocolate manufacturers have resorted to what Villacis calls “creative” strategies such as shrinkflation, or selling smaller candy bars at the same price. This is especially popular in the UK and in Europe: Toblerone in particular has come under scrutiny from fans who monitor the bars’ shape and size. But the most creative solution has been reformulation.

“They are just now replacing cocoa with other types of things, like more milk or more almonds or other types of coatings,” Villacis says.

One German brand, the Nestlé-owned Choco Crossies, recently announced it was eliminating cocoa altogether from its new Snack Vibes line, replacing it with ChoViva, a lab-grown “chocolate alternative” made from fermented sunflower and grape seeds.

The US, UK and EU all have government regulations about how much – or how little – cocoa an item can contain and still be considered “chocolate”, but those regulations are much stricter in Europe. In the UK, for instance, after Pladis reduced the amount of cocoa bean-derived ingredients in its McVitie’s Penguin and Club bars to below 20%, both treats were officially demoted from “chocolate” to “chocolate flavour”. In the US, the threshold is 15%, and low-cocoa items like the Unwrapped Mini Hearts can still be described as “chocolate candy”.

At the very end of 2025, cocoa prices fell for the first time in five years. The west African cocoa plantations had recovered from the weather shocks of the early 2020s and were producing again. This is not, however, a harbinger of the return of cheaper chocolate. Most chocolate companies already bought their cocoa in advance at the higher prices and are still working through it. They also have to rebuild their margins; last year, says Villacis, “they were absorbing a lot of the shock.” Also, when it comes to inflation, it’s much harder to lower prices than it is to raise them.

The cocoa supply still remains limited. The UK and EU have imposed stricter regulations against buying cocoa from deforested areas, and chocolate companies everywhere have become aware of the poor optics of working with growers that use enslaved children as free labor. Many younger cocoa farmers, says Villacis, are abandoning the plantations to look for work in the cities. Ecuador and Indonesia are both poised to replace west Africa as the world’s top source of cocoa, but they, too, are vulnerable to climate breakdown.

So what can the average consumer do? Brad Reese, for one, has sworn that he will never buy another Reese’s product again. “And for me, the grandson of HB Reese, to say that?” he says. “Blasphemy!”

It’s possible that if enough people join him, Hershey will respond. “These big companies are testing how consumers react,” says Villacis. “And they will adjust accordingly.”

Consumers are getting savvier, too, about reading packaging. Many have cracked the code of “milk chocolate” versus “chocolate candy” and know that ingredients are listed in order of largest first. A quick scan of Reese’s new Easter line reveals that the Snack Size Peanut Butter Eggs contain real milk chocolate, while the Mini Eggs, whose lead ingredient is sugar, merely have chocolate-ish coating.

Someone who is really serious about chocolate may be willing to pay more for a brand like Tony’s Chocolonely that makes a point of using ethically sourced ingredients, or for a premium chocolate bar like Pacari (Villacis’s personal favorite) that contains upwards of 50% cocoa and costs more than $10. But the real appeal of mass market chocolate like Hershey’s has always been its cheapness.

“These companies will look for any type of solution that will maximize the profit,” Villacis says. “If that means replacing the full amount of chocolate in the products, as long as the consumers keep buying, they’re going to be fine with it.”

Reese sees things slightly differently. “I just can’t see how Hershey’s going to succeed long term with Reese’s consumers,” he says. “Their trust has been betrayed. They’ve realized that they have to be on their toes to make sure they’re not fooled.”