I used to love Rowntree's Smarties. They were a British confectionery classic, and a favourite boyhood treat. What child didn't love the little cardboard tube and its jaunty plastic lid with a letter on its underside? Who didn't want a Smarties egg for Easter?
Well this evening I went to the corner shop looking for some treats and I saw some Smarties and thought, "There's a blast from the past - I've not had Smarties in ages!" and bought some.
Back at home, my dearly beloved and I opened our (sadly no longer plastic capped) cardboard tubes and poured a few out and ate them. The initial excitement was sufficient to deaden our taste buds, but a short while later, we turned to each other and said.
"These don't taste right."
And they didn't. They tasted wrong. They tasted rubbish.
The coloured sugary shells were too sweet and synthetically fruity, whilst the chocolate inside was just bland and dusty. We checked the sell-by date and they were fine. Except of course they weren't.
I sat for a moment, dwelling on it, and then I got angry.
Thank you Nestle. Thank you for buying a perfectly decent company making a perfectly decent product and ruining it. Thank you for transferring the business out of Britain and the taste out of the chocolate in the name of cost-cutting and increasing your shareholders' dividends. Thank you for your simple, clinical, Third World orphan-squeezing, childhood memory-crushing greed.
Thank you for absolutely nothing.
Well this evening I went to the corner shop looking for some treats and I saw some Smarties and thought, "There's a blast from the past - I've not had Smarties in ages!" and bought some.
Back at home, my dearly beloved and I opened our (sadly no longer plastic capped) cardboard tubes and poured a few out and ate them. The initial excitement was sufficient to deaden our taste buds, but a short while later, we turned to each other and said.
"These don't taste right."
And they didn't. They tasted wrong. They tasted rubbish.
The coloured sugary shells were too sweet and synthetically fruity, whilst the chocolate inside was just bland and dusty. We checked the sell-by date and they were fine. Except of course they weren't.
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| No artificial colours or flavours. And no Smarties magic any more either. |
I sat for a moment, dwelling on it, and then I got angry.
Thank you Nestle. Thank you for buying a perfectly decent company making a perfectly decent product and ruining it. Thank you for transferring the business out of Britain and the taste out of the chocolate in the name of cost-cutting and increasing your shareholders' dividends. Thank you for your simple, clinical, Third World orphan-squeezing, childhood memory-crushing greed.
Thank you for absolutely nothing.
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