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!)

Hershey Barbie Doll

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 only.

~ One entry per household.

~ Two winners will be chosen randomly on March 23rd and notified by email. Winners will have 24 hours to respond before a new winner is chosen.

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. Read more

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 of peanut butter cookies. ZonePerfect Chocolate Peanut Butter bars and Peanut toffee bars have also been added to the list.

South Bend Chocolate Co. has also issued a voluntary recall of certain candies manufactured with possibly tainted peanut butter.

Many other snack and candy companies are coming forward to say their treats are safe, such as Mars, Tastykake, and Hershey.

There have been nearly 500 cases of illness and six deaths linked to the salmonella outbreak.

Basically, steer clear of ready-made peanut butter snacks for a while (jarred peanut butter is not affected by any recalls — yet).

[image: flickr]

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 think this will hurt or help Hershey’s?

[image: flickr]

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 larger strawberry layer in the middle, and a small vanilla tip.

At room temperature these had a waxy mouth feel and even after being in the fridge for a bit to firm up they just kind of coat your mouth. Strawberry is definitely the dominant flavor — even upon just opening the bag it’s all you smell. The chocolate and vanilla are totally lost to the point that you wonder if they’re strawberry flavored too and just colored for the sake of being able to be called Neapolitan Kisses and not straight-up Strawberry Kisses.

Overall I wasn’t terribly impressed with this limited edition release, and the kids weren’t either which is saying something!

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 Idol, and considering the time frame I picked these up American Idol was still in its recent run, so at least they’re not expired! The bars are 1.74 oz and the wrapper has the familiar blue of a regular Crunch bar with a URL to forthekidinyou.com.

The bar is two crispy vanilla wafers with chocolate creme sandwiched between them. The outer covering of chocolate also contains the crisped rice bits of a regular bar.

The chocolate creme actually made the bar for me, though, I think. It had a strong chocolate-like flavor (and I say flavor because chocolate isn’t listed on the ingredients list, if you can believe it), that balanced out the bland chocolate of the outer coating (which ended up all over my fingers even at a room temp of 70 degrees).

Overall, I liked it and the kids liked it. I still can’t finish a full bar because of the over-punch of sweetness, but there’s no fear of it going to waste around here!

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 is like the other code, with the number being the last number in the year, the second character is a letter that represents the month. A = January, B = February, and so on. So a code like 9A would mean that the candy expires January of 2009.”

I grabbed a bag of M&M’s to check this out, and as you can see in the picture above this one apparently expired in December 2007, which is lame because I bought it in February 2008. But as several commenters in the original post pointed out, though, expired candy likely won’t make you sick, it’ll just taste off. I haven’t noticed anything funky about it so I think I’ll live!

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 Turkish. I’ve always wondered about Turkish Delight, and though it’s not the same as the Cadbury I appreciated the explanation.

- David Lebovitz shares his recipe for Devil’s Food Cake. The pictures are amazing.

- Hot Chocolate has a post from a few weeks ago about Starbucks partnering up with Hershey to bring chocolate items to their stores. It’ll be interesting to see how well this is received after the apparent Hershey revolt.

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 workforce of more than 13,000 and also plans to reduce the number of manufacturing lines it operates by almost a third. The company is building a new facility in Monterrey, Mexico, that it says will be focused on both low-value added products and on emerging markets, and it is setting up a joint manufacturing venture in China with Lotte Confectionery of South Korea.

Hershey’s Canadian operations are almost ended. Its Dartmouth, Nova Scotia plant, Hershey’s last remaining facility in Canada, will close in December 2007. Other plant closures include facilities in Oakdale, California; Naugatuck, Connecticut; and Reading, Pennsylvania.

“Low-value added products?” According to a web search that can mean “fats and oils, feed ingredients, corn products, meat, poultry and fish products.”

Related articles:

~ Hershey Profit Tumbles 96 Percent

~ Candy maker Hershey to cut jobs, send some manufacturing to Mexico

~ Hershey’s Flight to Mexico a Raw Deal for 3,000 Workers in U.S. and Canada