Anonymous wrote:It’s just the life cycle of snack foods in clown world. Step 1: high-quality product finds its market niche and becomes very popular; 2. Brand acquired by multinational food conglomerate looking to expand into high end market; 3. Food conglomerate substitutes cheap, low quality ingredients and production processes to cut costs and drive up margins; 4. Product now sucks, but it takes some time for people to figure it out and much money is made, 5. Product declines in popularity as people figure it out, but not everyone can tell the difference, so 6. Formerly premium ghost brands haunt the supermarket shelves. Case in point: Häagen-Daas. I’m on to Alden’s now, but I am sure Unilever or someone will buy it at some point and the cycle will repeat.

H-D vanilla bean still tastes good, to me. But we don't buy any of the other crazy flavors.

We have more sophisticated taste now.

I know I don't need to buy pepper Ridge Farms products. The size an quality are terrible now. Filling...What fillingsUsed to be you could taste the chocolate in the light, crispy cookie.

PF cookies and pop tarts are terrible now. Cross them off the list of items to buy.

The chocolate in it tastes bad like when you buy easter candy chocolate from the dollar store.

Anonymous wrote:No taste ,very bland ,cookie texture was very weird ? ,,I see why there smaller lol

Thanks AI bumper of zombie threads. You suck.

Flavored Perrier in a can is transforming and it does not taste the same to me. They are using a different spring for sure (based on news) and I don't know what else is different but it is. The plastic bottled lemon Perrier also never tasted like the glass or aluminum can Perrier (packaging effect - maybe on the carbonation).

Quaker Oats messed with the instant Maple and Brown Sugar recipe until it tasted like a Bath & Body Works candle. They put it back to "original recipe" for about a year then left the label on but changed it again. I stopped buying it.

Breyer's mint chocolate chip lost some mintiness years ago when they stopped having the replaceable plastic film freshness seal under the lid. Recently, they very obviously worsened the chocolate in it.

My only consolation is that Campbell's had to reverse its change of the Chicken & Stars soup recipe to subtract salt and eliminate the tiny star noodles. They said it was to eliminate noodle clumping. But everyone specifically wanted those tiny stars and not the giant, bad tasting openwork shapes they subbed in. Sales must have really cratered for them to swap back.

No taste ,very bland ,cookie texture was very weird ? ,,I see why there smaller lol

Anonymous wrote:It’s just the life cycle of snack foods in clown world. Step 1: high-quality product finds its market niche and becomes very popular; 2. Brand acquired by multinational food conglomerate looking to expand into high end market; 3. Food conglomerate substitutes cheap, low quality ingredients and production processes to cut costs and drive up margins; 4. Product now sucks, but it takes some time for people to figure it out and much money is made, 5. Product declines in popularity as people figure it out, but not everyone can tell the difference, so 6. Formerly premium ghost brands haunt the supermarket shelves. Case in point: Häagen-Daas. I’m on to Alden’s now, but I am sure Unilever or someone will buy it at some point and the cycle will repeat.

Yep.Sad but true.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I haven’t had those recently, but have noticed that other packaged treats don’t taste like they used to. How much of that is a changing palate and how much is changed ingredients though I don’t know.

The last time I got Fruit Newtons I couldn’t believe how much they’d shrunk the individual “cakes” (they’re fruit and cake, remember?). I remember them as being about two inches long and nearly as wide back in the day and they are now closer to one and a half inches long and proportionally less wide.

But I remember the package shrinkage during the recession under Bush.

Food companies suck.

Have they actually shrunk, or are you just misremembering? Everything used to be smaller back in the day.

I googled it. They shrunk them. http://wiredforweird.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-happened-to-my-fig-newtons.html

Do you not remember how much larger toilet paper rolls used to be? Those shrunk sometime in the last ten years, too. Like they shrunk the width of the roll and the individual squares used to be squares; they are now rectangles.

Maybe stale? Coincidentally I just had some for the first time in years tonight, and they were great. Introduced my teen to them and she loved them too.

If a boxed cookie doesn't use butter it is garbage. And even then it seems to be hit or miss, ex. Tate's are terrible now. Some imported brands from France and Belgium still make half-decent boxed cookies, with butter being one of the top ingredients. But really, there are so many fantastic bakeries in the DMV, get your cookie fix supporting one of them instead of buying shelf-stable chemical garbage.

Anonymous wrote:It’s just the life cycle of snack foods in clown world. Step 1: high-quality product finds its market niche and becomes very popular; 2. Brand acquired by multinational food conglomerate looking to expand into high end market; 3. Food conglomerate substitutes cheap, low quality ingredients and production processes to cut costs and drive up margins; 4. Product now sucks, but it takes some time for people to figure it out and much money is made, 5. Product declines in popularity as people figure it out, but not everyone can tell the difference, so 6. Formerly premium ghost brands haunt the supermarket shelves. Case in point: Häagen-Daas. I’m on to Alden’s now, but I am sure Unilever or someone will buy it at some point and the cycle will repeat.

ugh Aldens is amazing. Love their vanilla for crumbles.

It’s just the life cycle of snack foods in clown world. Step 1: high-quality product finds its market niche and becomes very popular; 2. Brand acquired by multinational food conglomerate looking to expand into high end market; 3. Food conglomerate substitutes cheap, low quality ingredients and production processes to cut costs and drive up margins; 4. Product now sucks, but it takes some time for people to figure it out and much money is made, 5. Product declines in popularity as people figure it out, but not everyone can tell the difference, so 6. Formerly premium ghost brands haunt the supermarket shelves. Case in point: Häagen-Daas. I’m on to Alden’s now, but I am sure Unilever or someone will buy it at some point and the cycle will repeat.

Anonymous wrote:Grew up in an immigrant household were 99% of the food was homemade. I remember not liking the store-bought treats and candy I would get from classmates. M&Ms have always tasted like chemicals to me. I never understood why kids would go crazy for them. Hostess, little debbie, keebler... all that stuff always tasted waxy, filmy, and chemically to me. When your palate is acclimated to whole foods, processed foods taste weird. This is likely why you think that the items taste different -- you are likely eating better than you did 30 years ago and your taste buds have adjusted.

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