Can it be chocolate

I might upset a few people here, but Cadbury Dairy Milk is not the chocolate bar it is in my memory. In fact, unless it is full of Fruit and Nut, wrapped around a Star Bar, stretched into a Curly Wurly or doing whatever glorious nonsense a Picnic does, it just does not taste that great to me anymore. That is not an easy thing to say, because Cadbury was not just chocolate when I was growing up. It was part of the furniture. It was birthdays, Christmas selection boxes, corner shops, packed lunches, vending machines, service stations, cinema bags, Easter eggs and the sort of treat you did not really question. Dairy Milk was the default. It was the baseline. It was the thing everything else had to beat. But somewhere along the line, the baseline moved.

Maybe part of this is nostalgia, because nostalgia is a dangerous ingredient. It adds richness to things that were probably never as good as we remember. Maybe the Dairy Milk in my memory has been improved by childhood, distance and the fact that most things taste better when you are ten years old and someone else paid for them. I accept all of that. But I do not think this is only nostalgia. I think the chocolate has become exposed by the fact that the rest of the market has moved on. There are now so many higher cocoa content, fabulous tasting milk chocolate bars around that our benchmark has changed. Once you get used to chocolate with more cocoa, more depth and a cleaner melt, Dairy Milk starts to feel very different. It feels sweet before it feels chocolatey. It melts, but not in the luxurious way. It is soft, but not rich. It has the memory of creaminess, rather than the reality of it. And then you look at the ingredients and the whole thing starts to make sense.

Cadbury Dairy Milk lists milk, sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, vegetable fats including palm and shea, emulsifiers and flavourings. It also declares 20% minimum cocoa solids, 20% minimum milk solids and 56g of sugars per 100g. It also carries the statement that it contains vegetable fats in addition to cocoa butter. That is not internet gossip or chocolate snobbery. That is on Cadbury’s own product information.

Now, before anyone starts, I am not saying Cadbury is breaking any rules. It clearly is not. The rules allow this. The law allows certain vegetable fats in chocolate, up to a maximum level, as long as they are properly labelled. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland explains that cocoa and chocolate products in the EU have defined categories, including chocolate, milk chocolate and family milk chocolate, and that vegetable fats other than cocoa butter can be used up to 5% of the chocolate component where labelled properly.

At this point, is where this becomes interesting to me. Just because something is legal does not mean it is good. Just because something meets a minimum standard does not mean it should be celebrated. A school dinner can meet a nutritional standard and still be grim. A hotel breakfast can technically include coffee and still taste like warm regret. A chocolate bar can sit inside the rules and still feel like it has lost something important. Standard "milk chocolate" in the EU is generally defined at 25% cocoa solids. The lower category, "family milk chocolate", sits at 20% cocoa solids. Dairy Milk is at 20%. Not 30%. Not 25%. Right on the floor of that lower category. One percentage point less and we would be having a very different conversation about whether it should even sit in that category at all. That is the bit I cannot unsee. We are not talking about a bar that is comfortably above the line. We are talking about one of Britain’s most loved chocolate brands sitting right on the edge of the minimum. It is like turning up to an exam, scraping a pass by one mark, then expecting everyone to applaud the quality of the answer.

And this is where Aldi becomes a really awkward comparison. Because even Aldi have created their Dairyfine milk chocolate bar with a very similar colour palette to Dairy Milk, but with 30% cocoa solids. This matters of course because it removes the easy defence that better chocolate has to be posh, expensive or wrapped in some artisan paper with a story about a hillside in Ecuador. This is not only a premium brand argument. This is not only a Hotel Chocolat argument. Even a budget supermarket can apparently decide that mainstream milk chocolate should have more cocoa in it.

That is why Cadbury frustrates me. It is not because I have suddenly become a chocolate snob, although I accept the evidence on that is building. It is because Dairy Milk trades on emotional status. It trades on memory, heritage and national affection. It wants to occupy the space of proper British chocolate, but when I eat it now, it feels more like a global snack product wearing the old clothes of a British institution. And maybe that is what has really changed. Maybe Cadbury has not changed as much as we think. Cadbury itself says the core Dairy Milk ingredients have not changed in over 40 years, including vegetable fats and a small amount of palm oil. That is worth acknowledging, because it makes the argument less simple than “they changed the recipe and ruined it”. Maybe they didn't. Maybe the bigger problem is that the world around Dairy Milk changed, and Dairy Milk didn't move with it.

Our palates have changed. Our options have changed. Our expectations have changed. We can buy better coffee in a petrol station than we used to get in some restaurants. We can buy decent sourdough in a supermarket. We can buy good olive oil, proper cheese, craft beer, single origin coffee and genuinely decent chocolate without needing to remortgage the house. The mainstream has improved in lots of places. But Dairy Milk still tastes to me like it is relying on our affection rather than earning it through quality. There is something quite British about that. We are very good at protecting the memory of things long after the thing itself has become a bit ordinary. We do it with pubs, seaside towns, football grounds, high streets, biscuits, politicians and chocolate bars. We confuse affection with quality. We say “you can’t beat it” when what we really mean is “I remember loving it”.

However, in the case of chocolate, memory is not an ingredient. Cocoa is.

For me, chocolate should have a certain depth. It does not need to be dark, bitter or worthy. I am not asking every bar to taste like it was made by a serious man in linen trousers who wants to discuss fermentation. Milk chocolate can be joyful. It can be sweet. It can be creamy. It can be uncomplicated. But it still needs to taste properly of chocolate. That is where Dairy Milk now falls down for me. It tastes overly sweet, flat and a bit waxy compared with the chocolate many of us grew up loving. It has lost that proper creamy chocolate hit. It does not have enough depth to stand on its own anymore, which is probably why I still enjoy it when it is buried under raisins, nuts, caramel, wafer, peanuts or whatever structural engineering keeps a Picnic together. In other words, I do not dislike all Cadbury. I dislike what plain Dairy Milk has become in my mouth. There is a difference. Star Bar still works because it is basically a peanut and caramel argument with chocolate involved. Curly Wurly still works because it is fun and ridiculous. Fruit and Nut still works because the fruit and nuts do some of the heavy lifting. Picnic still works because nobody has ever fully understood it, and that is part of its charm. But plain old Dairy Milk? That is where my problem sits. When the chocolate has to carry the whole thing on its own, it does not carry it for me anymore.

So, can it be chocolate? Legally, yes. Of course it can. But that is not really the question I am asking. The better question is whether it still feels like good chocolate. Whether it still tastes like the thing we think we are buying. Whether it deserves the emotional status we still give it. Sadly, for me, the answer is no. It is chocolate by definition, but borderline by standard. It is legal, familiar and massively successful, but that does not make it great. It sits right on the floor of the lower family milk chocolate category in the EU, leans heavily into sugar and vegetable fats, and depends on a level of nostalgia that the actual taste no longer justifies.

Maybe Cadbury has changed. Maybe we have changed. Maybe chocolate has simply moved on.

Either way, for me, the magic has gone.

How about you ?