I wrote just last week about the sweet collaboration between Hershey and Barbie — the Hershey’s Collector Barbie. Now two very lucky Chocolate Bytes readers will get to win one for themselves! (I’m totally green with envy!)
The beautiful brunette Barbie is dressed in a silver and chocolate brown cocktail dress with a Hershey ribbon around her waist. She also has sweet little silver and chocolate brown heels and silver earrings.
To Enter:
Leave a comment here telling me your favorite Barbie doll AND/OR your favorite Hershey product. That’s it! Contest ends Monday, March 23 at 5:00pm PDT.
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~ Contest open to US residents …read more

I’m not sure that these are something I would wear, but I like the concept! Demeter has created Hershey chocolate perfumes in both Kisses and Special Dark.

Snack giants Keebler, Little Debbie, General Mills and Austin are recalling peanut butter treats in the wake of the salmonella-tainted peanut butter scare from last week.
Though there have been no complaints about illnesses from the Little Debbie snacks specifically, the company is still recalling peanut butter toasty sandwich crackers and peanut butter cheese sandwich crackers made since July 1.
General Mills is recalling their popular LARABAR Peanut Butter Cookie and JamFrakas Peanut Butter Blisscrisp snack bars.
The Hy-Vee supermarket chain is recalling bakery products that contain peanut butter, and Ralcorp Frozen Bakery Products, which sells through Wal-Mart has recalled several brands …read more

It was bound to happen (again!): Hershey’s announced last Friday that, effective immediately, it’s raising U.S. prices on its wholesale products by about 13%. They cited the higher cost of ingredients like cocoa, milk, corn sweetener, sugar and peanuts.
The mega-chocolate maker said its 2008 profit will be at the low end of its forecast range and they have cut sales growth projections for 2009, sending its shares down more than 4%.
This further cements my decision that if I’m spending the money on chocolate it’s going to a quality brand, which Hershey just hasn’t been for a while.
Do you …read more

Another trip down the candy aisle at Sam’s Club recently turned up this large bag of Limited Edition Neapolitan Hershey Kisses. I love neapolitan ice cream so I had high hopes for these!

The bag I found is 24 oz and I picked it up for about $7. Each candy is wrapped in the standard Kisses foil, and like all the other Limited Editions these have their own special design of silver, brown and fuchsia with a little flag that says “Neapolitan.”

Neapolitan consists of three layers containing chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. Hershey’s pulled this off with chocolate on the bottom, a …read more

Another trip to Sam’s, another box of candy bars! This time I found the Nestle Crunch Crisp, and much like the Snickers Charged I liked it well enough.
I’m not a fan of Nestle chocolate much anymore. Like Hershey I think the quality has gone downhill over the years though there are still the occasional treats from both that I’ll pick up when I get a craving. A Nestle Crunch is one of those, though I prefer the mini bars because a regular sized with the sub-standard “chocolate” is too much.
Anyway, the packaging for this one features an ad for American …read more

The Consumerist had a great article yesterday on how to determine if M&M’s, Mars or Hershey candy is expired:
“For M&Ms and Mars candy, there’s usually a 10 digit code of numbers and letters, but you only need to worry about the first three. The first number is the last number in the year (8 means 2008, 7 means 2007, etc) and the next two numbers stand for the week of the year (so, a number like 804 would be the fourth week of 2008: February 2008).
“For Hershey’s candy, there’s a 2 character code for the month and year. The year …read more

American Idol judge Paula Abdul has apparently shelled out $3000 for a dress made for the reality show Project Runway a few months ago. It’s no ordinary dress though – it was made out of Hershey chocolate wrappers! Hershey and Project Runway teamed up this week to auction off all the dresses used in the candy wrapper competition, which came to approximately $7,583.98.
She says she plans to wear it for Halloween this year. Check out a projection of what she’ll look like here.
[image: stock.xchng]

I’ve been trying to find some more chocolate sites and blogs to add to my blogroll recently and in the process have come across some great sites. Below I’ve picked just a few noteworthy entries out of all the great links over in the sidebar:
- Chocolate Obsession reviews… bacon-flavored chocolate. For real.
- The Chocolate Nerd found Guayabitas: “sweet guava jelly drops rolled in sunkissed Costa Rican dark chocolate.”
- Chocablog has an amazingly huge slab of milk chocolate, caramel milk chocolate and white chocolate swirled together. A bit of perspective can be found here. Chocablog also reviews Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with …read more

The general Hershey’s Move to Mexico report has made it to Snopes.com. They’re debunking the news that all US plants are moving to Mexico, when in reality it’s just over 10% of their workforce (so far). Snopes tags this as just “partly true,” but I can’t help but think it’s going to be tagged “true” over the next couple of years:
In February 2007, Hershey’s announced it would be cutting more than ten percent of its workforce and closing some of its U.S. plants. It expects to do away with about 1,500 jobs over the next three years from its current …read more