Hershey’s Natural Flavanol Antioxidant Milk Chocolate

For those of you who read Chocablog, you might remember Dom reviewing these a good few weeks ago. I was also sent a sample of the same 3 packs by Hershey, but never actually got the package until yesterday! For some reason my University didn’t want to tell me they had a box of chocolate for me, but I finally found out and picked it up, and decided I’d put the reviews of the three seperate packs up over the next 3 days. The first one I decided to eat was this – Hershey’s Natural Flavanol Antioxidant Milk Chocolate, quite a mouthful, no?

According to the pack, this has more flavanol antioxidants than the leading dark chocolate, with 260mg per 40g serving, as opposed to 110mg in the leading dark chocolate. But what are flavanol antioxidants? Well, they don’t say on the pack, so I had to do some research. Searching Google for “flavanol antioxidant” brought me here, to a Hershey webpage. There’s a lot to take in there, so to summarise, antioxidants are chemicals that help the body prevent damage to cells and DNA. This happens naturally overtime, though poor diet, as well as smoking and excessive drinking, as well as other ‘poor’ lifestyle choices, can also speed up this cell damaging process. Antioxidants are commonly found in foods such as berries, green tea, red wine, dark chocolate and nuts. This chocolate though, from Hershey, has more of these antioxidants than any other selected food of Hershey’s choice. So, that all sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Well unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here on.

The package contains 12 of the pictured chocolates. These are small, thin squares, not completely unlike After Eights, as would probably be the best example, though these are solid milk chocolate, and have pictures of either ‘HERSHEY’ or some sort of…leaf, etched into the chocolate. The smell isn’t good, in fact after tasting some already and smelling them after…it is in fact a sign of what’s to come. Those of you from Britain who have tried the plain milk chocolate Hershey’s bar will most likely know what I’m talking about here. There’s a faint smell of…vomit. Yeah, I can understand that this may be hard to believe, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it. I remember the first time I had a Hershey’s bar (well, the only time) and actually thought I’d thrown up in my mouth, at least…before I did, because they taste awful.

This, sadly, is no different. It tastes exactly how I remember it. Absolutely disgusting. I feel a little bad saying it because I got it for free, and almost feel like I should be positive here, but these are seriously terrible. No doubt the worst chocolate I’ve reviewed on here yet. It’s especially bad after the chocolate I reviewed yesterday, which puts this to absolute shame. I just don’t understand what it is that Hershey are putting into their chocolate, I mean they’re packing it full of these antioxidants, yet they can’t get rid of the added vomit? I was looking at the ingredients and nothing there seems too out of this world: Sugar, Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin, etc. I’ve seen all those before, so I’m wondering what it is…I thought maybe it was PGPR, but after looking into that…perhaps not. I’d really like to know because it’s bugging me. Anyway, I ate one more after just to see if maybe it was just a bad chocolate, but no…it’s all bad chocolate. It’s terrible, terrible chocolate, and it can have as much antioxidants as it wants, it can cure all my cellular and DNA damage, and I still wouldn’t eat it or recommend it.

Still if you’re a crazy person, and want to know the nutritional information, then here goes. Each serving size is 4 pieces (3 servings per pack), and each serving has 190 calories (110 from fat), 3g Protein, 23g Carbohydrates (21 of which sugars) and 12g Fat (7g of which saturates). I don’t need to say anymore, other than I’m glad I didn’t pay for this, and that I’m glad it’s not coming out in Britain, I’d hate for anyone I know to waste their money on this.