This.
This.
I have days when Hershey’s is what gets me through the day.
I grew up with it. My guess was that the quality has gone down since the 1970s. I could be wrong, however.
Depends on the tit, but yeah, show me some options.
Just to keep a sense of perspective, remember that many of the people overseas who criticize Hershey’s chocolate also don’t like peanut butter. 
Googling these claims suggests urban legend to me. I’ve been unable to find anything authoritative.
Yes, hershey’s only sin is that it is boring. If the problem is simply that you’ve tried it and you don’t like it, and you continue to try it and you continue to not like it, I’m hard-pressed to blame Hershey for that.
Hershey’s is a US brand. Going by your skittles remark I am thinking you are British or some variant of nonCanadian Colonial.
Let me 'splain - Hershey’s milk chocolate has a slightly soured milk and scorch undertone to the flavor because when the original Hershey’s milk chocolate was developed the milk used was slightly soured and the cooking process gave it that slightly burnt flavor. Since it is what the generic we the US kids grew up with, it is normal to us. The fancier Swiss made milk chocolates didn’t have the same sour burnt flavor profile so that is what the Europeans grew up with.
It is all in what you grew up with. <shrug> I don’t happen to like hazelnuts mixed in with my chocolate so I don’t get the whole nutella-lust thing going on.
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You’re right that there isn’t anything definitive. The speculation (as it’s a trade secret) is that the milk is partially lipolized, which is what gives it its distinctive sour twang. Regardless of how it’s achieved, there’s a distinctive sourness/tang of their milk chocolate that is not present in any other chocolates that I (and many others) have noticed.
This is the best I can find so far, from a biography of Hershey.
I don’t really get the Hershey hatred. That said, I’ve lived in the US for a long time now so may I acquired the taste. I can’t distinguish it from Whitman’s or Russell Stover or other US-made chocolate.
What I do know is that I’ve never met anyone in real life who said they loved Hershey chocolate but had tried anything else. I gave my wife her first Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (which is, let’s face it, not supposed to be anything fancy) and when she tried it her eyes lit up like she had been let out of prison for the first time.
I doubt the quality has declined over the years. It’s just that we have access to better chocolate now than when Hershey’s was formulating its bar. Even Dove Chocolate, which is available pretty much anywhere Hershey’s is, is far superior. However, Hershey’s will keep making Hershey’s Bars as long as people buy them, just like other candies with unexplainable followings … cf. threads on Circus Peanuts and Peeps.
Oh I get it. People love to hate whatever is popular, and thanks to the internet, we all become aware of it. Some people are really adept at making you seem to be the wrong, uncultured, ordinary even, for liking things that happen to be popular.
It’s the thinking that, if it is popular, it CANNOT be good. Where does that come from? I feel that, if something is say, the number 1 brand, it is “good” by definition.
I can assert with some confidence that Blurred Lines was not the best song of 2013, even if it was the year’s best selling single.
I’d moderate that statement to “…said they loved Hershey most”, and probably also require that they have tried a variety of others. There are certainly brands that I like better than Hershey’s, but there are also brands that I like less. I find that I like Hershey’s better than Nestle, for instance, and if somebody had only tried those two, they might reasonably call Hershey’s the best chocolate they’d had.
In what way is chocolate “better” now than a hundred years ago? And how can something that’s purely a matter of individual taste be “superior”?
I like Swiss chocolate, I like Belgian chocolate, I like Cadbury’s chocolate, and I like Hershey’s chocolate. What’s not to like?
I see you point, but I should have clarified. I meant things like beer. If Bud is the most popular brand, then it is “good”, because when people drink it, they like it. For whatever reason they drink beer, they enjoy Bud. So to them it is a “good” beer.
When the beer snobs come out and list any of the myriad ways that Bud doesn’t measure up to what they think beer should be, they make two mistakes. They think their tastes are all that matter (how dare people like something I don’t) and they think there is a definite absolute standard of “beer”.
When Busch spent all that time perfecting what he thought was the ‘perfect’ beer, one could argue he was right. The ones arguing he was a sellout are the ones making bitter beers, or beers with more unique flavors, that they like but not enough others do.
Note: I don’t prefer Bud. It IS too bland for me. But I’m not going around telling people they are wrong for liking it, either.
That’s the blessing and the curse of the modern American marketplace. There are more choices available than you can do anything with, but there are always people who try to make you feel inferior for not liking what they like.
Why can’t we all get along? Here, let me buy you a Hershey bar!
I consider myself a chocolate connoisseur. I mix mine own hot-cocoa powder for everyday use, and I’ve made various types of choco bars/fudge for fun. I even did chocolate blind-taste party once. (Got a theobromine hangover from it too.)
Anyone who rejects Hershey’s as low-quality simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Their own personal tastes are preventing them from objectively evaluating the chocolate. I think there’s also a “it’s popular so I’ll reject it” component as well.
Hershey bars are not low quality. Low quality chocolate has paraffin in it, sometimes a lot. (Mexican and east-Asian brands are especially guilty of this.) Hershey’s does not.
Hershey’s does have a unique taste and mouthfeel. That’s a good thing; it’s a sin to think of chocolate as a commodity. Cadbury and Lindt also have their unique qualities as well. Ghiradelli is rather generic, to my taste.
It’s fine to have a favorite brand or bar. Simple-minded rejection of Hershey’s demonstrates an unsophisticated palate–more like a toddler than a snob.
/rant
Old people who buy the same brand no matter how much it starts sucking.
I’m not a huge fan of Hershey’s anymore, but there’s no denying its cultural import. Nobody ever suffered the Godiva squirts, or took a trip down the Ghirardelli Highway.
But there is an objective element here. Budweiser (and in all probability Hershey’s too) is constantly reformulated to broaden its appeal. The trick is not to appeal to the most palates; it’s to make the beer drinkable to the most palates. Budweiser tastes the way it does because it’s designed to appeal to people who don’t like beer.
This process might be uniquely American.