Sweet sensations

Cultural preferences for candy bars

By Caroline Cummins

July 13, 2007

So the New York Times has discovered that junk food across the pond is, despite similar names and flavors, not the same at all.

The world’s best candy bars, according to Kim Severson’s article, are British. And, like Coca-Cola bottled in the U.S. (with high fructose corn syrup as the sweetener) versus in Mexico (with the more delicately flavored cane sugar), American versions of British candy originals taste different. Worse, according to many.

It’s not just cultural habit, either; American knockoffs are made with far more processed ingredients than the British bars. As Severson points out in her description of the classic Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar:

It’s a different bar from the Cadbury bar available in the United States. According to the label, a British Cadbury Dairy Milk bar contains milk, sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, vegetable fat and emulsifiers. The version made by the Hershey Company, which holds the license from Cadbury-Schweppes to produce the candy in the United States under the British company’s direction, starts its ingredient list with sugar. It lists lactose and the emulsifier soy lecithin, which keeps the cocoa butter from separating from the cocoa. The American product also lists “natural and artificial flavorings.”

Americans, of course, are still overwhelmingly loyal to Hershey, Mars, and the like. (Just don’t get the now-discontinued American Mars bar confused with the British one, which is more like the American Milky Way. Got that?) But the British system can be addictive; I lived there as a child, and still long for the sweet-sour fruity chewiness of Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles, especially the blackcurrant flavor (excuse me, flavour). And my father is, and will always be, a dedicated Yorkie chocolate bar man.

As the Yorkie bar’s cheerfully un-PC advertising slogan goes, “It’s not for girls.” Or wussy Americans, either.