Brad Reese is the grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H.B. Reese and apparently has spent much of his adult life going out in public proudly wearing the brand’s orange logos and merch. Earlier this year, he called out the Hershey Company for allegedly replacing premium ingredients with cheaper substitutes such as compound coatings and “peanut butter creme” instead of traditional milk chocolate and peanut butter. After initially denying the charges, the brand recently (and quietly) is making a change back to their original ingredients.
For some consumer advocates, this is just the most recent example of a phenomenon described as “skimpflation” where companies cut back on services and products as a way to maintain or avoid raising prices too much but rather decreasing the value a consumer gets for the same or similar money. This isn’t entirely a new tactic either. According to food science professor Dr. Richard Hartel:
This is “’a typical story that’s told in the food industry about cost reduction.” If you successfully tweak a product recipe for cost, even expert tasters will not be able to tell the new recipe from last year’s. But what if you repeat this process every year for 10 years? If you “looked at your product 10 years ago [compared] with what you have now, that can be a very different product,” says Hartel. “Each year’s shift is imperceptible.”
This slow devolving of quality seems to have been thwarted in this case by a clearly invested brand fan who also happens to be related to the original product inventor. He cares more than the ordinary person and offered his platform to shame Hershey’s into backing down. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: consumers with singular passion and the platform to have their voices heard are the ultimate instigators of change. No matter how much products change, this conclusion seems to remain true over time.