Hershey comes to the rescue by coming out with a milk chocolate that is good for me. Yeah! Now I can go back to my midnight chocolate binges without the guilt! The package claims “More Flavonal Antioxidants than the leading dark chocolate.” The back of the package even has a business-like PowerPoint presentation slide with a bar graph showing that the product has more “Antioxidant Capacity” than red wine, green tea and almonds. Notice that the marketing people even kept the acronym “ORAC” in their presentation.
I kid you not:

Ok, but how does it taste? Because beyond the hype and gimmicky marketing, it’s all about taste. In a side-by-side taste test with the regular Hershey’s milk chocolate, the HAMC (probably the acronym they used to stand for Hershey’s Antioxidant Milk Chocolate) was surprisingly good. Smooth, velvety, chocolatey, sweet but not too sweet. In fact, after having a piece of the HAMC, the regular Hershey’s Milk Chocolate tasted gritty, and lacked the chocolatey taste and even tasted “fruity.”

But let’s not kid ourselves here. If I’m looking for health benefits, I’m going to pick up an apple, not a bag of Hershey’s chocolate. Like red wine, claiming health benefits is just a way for us chocoholics to make ourselves feel better about indulging. With 12 grams of fat and 21 grams of sugar, this isn’t health food. It’s just really good milk chocolate that makes you feel less guilty.

I don’t blame them, Hershey’s executive team probably needed to make sure that they didn’t miss this “chocolate antioxidant” fad.