Hershey, who tried changing the definition of "chocolate," now banking on purity.

Hershey is lame.

They were late to the game during (dark) chocolate’s resurgence as a health benefit. Now your average suburbanite would rather spend $5 on a designer chocolate bar from Trader Joe’s with 80% cocoa that tastes like licking tree bark run through someone's ass than 50 cents on a Hershey’s bar of the same size. You have to really screw up your company if your customers would rather spend 10 times the amount of money on a competing product that makes them gag.

But that's not why they're lame. I think it's good that Hershey's hasn't tried to be something they're not and get all boutiquey on us. Would you trust a Hershey's bar with chunks of mango, ginger, and habanero peppers?

It's Hershey’s new campaign that annoys me. They’re essentially re-branding themselves as what they’ve always been – the boring Campbell’s soup of chocolate that no one likes anymore. But their new emphasis of purity is repulsive.

Read on, and I'll explain.

From AdWeek:

Hershey this week began airing a TV spot that marks the beginning of its "Pure Hershey's" campaign, which seeks to associate the candy maker's chocolate with feelings of happiness, innocence and simplicity.

[…] The first 30- and 15-second ads, via Havas' Arnold, will run next quarter and into 2009-all aiming to connect Hershey's chocolate with various pleasant emotions.

The current spot is the work of Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations. It takes viewers inside a Hershey's candy bar that melts into an animated scene of a girl on a swing, which morphs into another scene showing the girl and her boyfriend driving in a chocolate convertible. Chocolate bunnies chase the couple as they ride into the sunset and "I Melt With You" by Modern English provides background music. A female voiceover asks: "What makes a Hershey's bar pure?" She then answers: "Pure simplicity," "pure happiness," "pure delicious."

Okay, about this "pure" garbage. Isn't this the company that aggressively lobbied the FDA to change the definition of "chocolate?" From Wikipedia:

In 2007, the Chocolate Manufacturers Association, whose members include Hershey, Nestlé, and Archer Daniels Midland, began to lobby the FDA to change the legal definition of chocolate to let them substitute partially hydrogenated vegetable oils for cocoa butter as well as artificial sweeteners and milk substitutes. Currently, the FDA does not allow a product to be referred to as "chocolate" if the product contains any of these ingredients.

In fall 2007, Hershey changed their milk chocolate recipe by adding lactose, milk fat, and the food additive PGPR.

PGPR, by the way, is Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate, a chemical emulsifier used to reduce the need for cocoa butter, and thus make the chocolate even cheaper to produce.

Ah, purity!

Addendum: Hershey Park is still cool.