Friday, February 27, 2026

Exciting announcement - effective immediately, Wolmania is going electric bi-weekly! Meaning every two weeks, not twice a week. Why, you ask? Because that's what I want to do, and it's my damn newsletter.

Item 1: a link

This is one of those things that you never notice until you're made aware of it and suddenly you see it everywhere: the chocolate isn't real anymore.

It can be hard to know what exactly to call the substances that are now found coating many major candy bars such as Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar or Rolos. Food scientists refer to it as “compound chocolate” coating, because it’s made from actual cocoa powder, but replaces the more expensive source of fat (cocoa butter) with cheaper, lower-quality vegetable fats. When Hershey brands such as Mr. Goodbar or Almond Joy made the switch in recent years, their labels subtly changed from claiming that they were “milk chocolate,” to “chocolate candy,” which strikes me as particularly insidious phrasing. A more obvious indicator is another word that many companies use: “Chocolatey” coating. Wondering how much this scourge had infiltrated my own home, I took a look moments ago at several packages of Girl Scout Cookies, only to find the inevitable: Both my Thin Mints and Peanut Butter Patties are also made with compound chocolate, rather than the real thing. I can hardly pretend to be surprised. Even in candies that continue to use real chocolate, meanwhile, cost-cutting measures have sometimes been employed, such as the milk chocolate coating of a Snickers bar becoming slightly thinner over time. Some products even mix real chocolate and compound chocolate in a single cookie or candy.

But wait, it gets worse! Not content to merely replace one key element of chocolate, food scientists and entrepreneurs have teamed up to create products such as “a chocolate that’s made without cocoa using AI technology to reverse-engineer the recipe.” I was just thinking that we really needed to get AI involved in there somewhere. This company, NotCo, specializes in an entire range of plant-based fake foods, with CEO Matias Muchnick raving to Today at the end of 2025 that “we have trained an algorithm to replicate exactly the favorite chocolate that you always loved,” sounding not at all like an ancient creature that preys on human hopes and dreams. Said fake chocolate, if you were wondering, is ultimately assembled from ingredients that include carob, shea butter and malt extract, with the savvy entrepreneur saying that it could save manufacturers in the ballpark of 30%. Check out the grandiosity of this gloating quote: “I think we have a high chance of being the ones that actually saved chocolate for the rest of humanity.” Wow, “saving chocolate” by destroying it. Talk about your world-class achievements in CEO douchebaggery.

This is all going around, I guess, because of this recent article about how a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup scion is upset that his daily candy is worse now, but a cursory non-AI search of the World Wide Web turned up this editorial from 2008 about the same phenomenon, so this is nothing new. And I get why people are up in arms – my first instinct is also to decry the evil megacorporations who are making their products worse to save some money. But honestly... I do kind of wonder if this is such a bad thing.

Like, okay, cocoa beans are super expensive because of the Republican Party's decades-long effort to set the world on fire. Climate change, we can all agree, is a bad thing and getting worse. But in terms of this specific issue, maybe we should see if we can use science (presumably in other countries that still believe in it) to create sustainable alternatives that are as good as the stuff we're making impossible to grow. As far as I can tell, we are not at all there yet – it doesn't seem to have hurt sales, but this pseudo-chocolate is clearly not up to par when compared to real, high quality chocolate.

But people have been talking trash about American chocolate for years, even the real stuff. Just because it maybe tastes a little bit like vomit. So it's not like there isn't room for improvement across the board. Let's get some Swiss chemists on the case and come up with synthetic chocolate, made from recycled Amazon boxes or whatever, that tastes better than vintage Milky Way bars. And we can reserve our limited stores of cocoa butter for more important things.

Item 2: a list

Arch Deluxe Components, Ranked:

1. Classic, American cheese
2. New ‘secret sauce’ for grown-ups
3. Sweet, Spanish onions
4. Soft, buttery homestyle bun
5. Fresh, crisp, iceberg lettuce
6. Juicy, quarter-pound patty of McDonald’s 100% pure domestic beef
7. Hickory, smoked bacon
8. Sweet, extra-fancy tomato ketchup
9. Juicy, ripe, delicious tomato

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Dovecote

I know you didn't mean any harm, but in retrospect I think it's clear that leaving the cat alone in the dovecote was a really, really bad idea.

Item 5: an image

See ya!

Thanks for reading. See you oxt week.