If Kraft can produce best-selling industrial cheeses why can't Nestle? It's slightly alarming to see that in Mexico Nestle is selling a cheese they call Manchego. Indeed, the cheese they call Manchego could not be any more different than the original Manchego, produced in the region of La Mancha in Spain. Instead of being made with sheep's milk, it's made with cow's milk. While Manchego has a striking bright dark rind, this one is rindless. In short, Nestle's version is highly manufactured; Manchego is artisanal.

The larger issue is whether or not the Spanish government should protect the Manchego name, like France has done with Champagne and Mexico with tequila. Nestle is taking advantage of a Spanish cheese and marketing their version under its name. It's no wonder why the company is selling it specifically in Mexican grocery stores. But, perhaps I am being too judgmental of Nestle. After all, think of what the American food market has done to mozzarella. Check out the poll below to let us know what you think.

If you thought that the grocery store was the only place you'd ever find Nestlé products, think again. As of last week they're on the cosmetic counters at Neiman Marcus.

The food-making giant launched the Glowelle brand, their entry into the nascent beauty nutraceutical industry. While nutraceuticals specifically for the beauty market have been popular in Japan for the last few years, that use is virtually unknown in the US.

Beauty nutraceuticals are generally drinks or juices that are aimed at some beauty issue, such as skin appearance. Drink the product and your skin will be glowing, or that's the idea. Nestle's Glowelle comes in two flavors: natural jasmine and natural pomegranate lychee.

I might not be the best person to talk about chocolate. Growing up, my favorite candies were generally the tart, fake-fruit flavored ones, like Smarties, Sweet Tarts, Lemonheads, Runts, and certain Jolly Rancher flavors. However, even in the midst of my deepest obsession with the sour side of the candy chain, I still had a special place in my heart for a few chocolate treats. Reese's cups, Caramello, and Chunky bars have always held a strange power over me and I've never been able to walk past a bowl full of M&Ms without grabbing a handful. After I got married, my wife dragged me over to the dark side, and I discovered the wonders of dark chocolate, particularly when paired with red wine. Even now, though, I will sometimes indulge my deep appreciation of plebian chocolate treats, especially when my wife isn't looking.

Recently, though, I came across an article that makes me a little worried about the future of my favorite mass-market chocolate goodies. Some candy companies, including Hershey's and Nestle, are substituting cheap vegetable oils for cocoa butter in their chocolate bars. While this saves a lot of money, it also reduces the creaminess and flavor of the chocolate; some consumers have described the new products as tasting "waxy and artificial."

On the bright side, the FDA has ruled that products which do not contain cocoa butter cannot refer to themselves as chocolate. Consequently, many former "chocolate bars" now boast that they are "made with chocolate," are "chocolate candy," or have "chocolate coating." Most of the major candy companies have unsuccessfully fought this, while smaller manufacturers are desperately supporting the labeling restrictions.

While Nestle and Hershey's try to decide if they're willing to spend a few more pennies to ensure a top-quality chocolate experience, you might want to take a long, hard look at your candy bar. After all, if you're willing to splurge on calories and cash, shouldn't you get the best possible chocolate experience?

I just love it when food and art overlap. Food artist Prudence Emma Staite has created a collection of works that recreate famous paintings out of chocolate Smarties. There's a wide range, from Pop Art to some more classical works.

The collection is showing at the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in east London on Friday. It's all part of the Smartie Art Exhibit, which is celebrating the return of the blue Smartie.

Do you think Nestle would sponsor an exhibition if they brought anything else back? I'd have to do some research about what to reintroduce, but I bet I could think of something. What do you think would make a good food art project?

Did anyone else catch this joke? I know it's a few days late, but I just came across it and I don't remember seeing it on any other food blogs. This is actually pretty funny, and I wish I had seen it in time for the actual day in question.

I found a press release that claimed that Nestle's Butterfinger bar was changing its name to the Finger, effective immediately. I didn't even notice the date of the press release until later, but I wondered to myself if this wasn't a late April fool's joke. Nope, it was a right-on-time joke.

Anyway, check this out for the whole joke. Hopefully you'll laugh as much as I did, even if it is a little late.

OK, I admit it. I like some Nestle products. I know I shouldn't. I am a pretty big chocolate snob. But I, like a lot of people, grew up with these candy bars. It's hard to get over that. I still enjoy the occasional KitKat bar. I'd like it even more if I were in Japan. There, Nestle Japan has come out with a new variety of the wafer bar, and they are just my style.

The new variety is called KitKat Lucky Little's. They are bite sized versions of the original and they are pink! Well,pink and white. Pink just happens to be my favorite color and I pretty much can get drawn in by anything that color. Apparently the color is meant to represent blooming cherry blossoms.

Not only are the snacks completely adorable, Nestle Japan has created a cute game to go with them. You just buy a bag of the candy (of course) and count how many pieces of each color you got. Then you go to their website, and have your fortune told based on those numbers.

Though I suppose this would be an ok snack for the super bowl, the pink and white coloring of the candies might not be the best fit. Maybe they'd be better for the next big holiday coming up. But I guess that point is moot if you're in the U.S. I want to go to Japan!

[Via ColdMud]

Since most of us love chocolate (some like all kinds of chocolate), it would be good to know why we're so addicted to the stuff. Could it be ... bacteria?

Nestle paid for a study in Switzerland that showed that, while everyone has various microbes in their stomachs and intestines, people who crave chocolate seem to have different types of microbes than other people. The study actually took a while to complete because they couldn't find 11 men who didn't like chocolate!

I'm not sure what's more interesting: the fact that people who love chocolate have different types of bacteria in their body, or the fact that we all have trillions of bacteria in our bodies.

Have you ever had this happen to you? You love a certain food or flavor for years, and then one day, for some reason, you're completely turned off by it and don't want to have it again? That's what is happening with me right now with mocha.

More specifically, mocha drinks. As I've mentioned here many times, I don't really like coffee, but I like drinks that have a mocha flavor in them. I bought Nestle's Ice Java chocolate mocha flavored syrup for a couple of years. I really liked it, and bought it again this summer. About two weeks ago it suddenly started to taste...um, really bad to me. It didn't taste right at all. I don't know if they changed the formula or if my bottle had gone bad (the date was fine), but it suddenly tasted really sharp and bitter and disgusting. They don't make the other flavors anymore (at least they don't sell them in my area).

But the mocha problems don't end there.

Question: what if Hershey went from using cocoa butters in their chocolate to using vegetable fats and artificial sweeteners?

That's what might happen. They're asking the Food and Drug Administration to change the standards in which chocolate is made and classified, to "modernize" the making of chocolate. Hershey isn't the only company asking the question, it's everyone.

This is sacrilege! We all know that chocolate, even when its high in fat and calories, has a lot of health benefits too. And if people want to have diet chocolate or a chocolate substitute, there are plenty of products already on the market. Changing the taste of Hershey chocolate would be like changing America, damn it!

Check out this site to record your protest.

The first aerated chocolate that I tasted was a Nestle's Aero bar. Never having seen aerated chocolate before, I was intrigued by the prospect of bubble filled chocolate and eager to find out what it tasted like. It was light, crumbly and quite unlike any other chocolates that I had had. I wasn't hugely impressed at the time, but many years and many chocolate bars later, I realize that I was probably expecting a more impressive sensation from the bar.

Aerated chocolate is chocolate that has lots of small air bubbles suspended in it, giving it a somewhat honeycombed appearance and a light texture. The thin walls separating the bubbles snap easily, so the chocolate crumbles into your mouth before melting from the heat. In the past, this type of chocolate has not been very popular in the US and it is generally only found in stores that stock Aeros imported from Australia, Canada or the UK, but that may change because Bubble Chocolate is an American company that is hoping to capture the hearts, and tongues, with their version of the candy.

Yesterday I mentioned some really unusual chocolate chip flavors from Vosges, but I neglected to mention that they are not the only ones making a foray into unusually flavored chips. Nestle has previously released several types of swirled chocolate chips, their Tollhouse Morsels, including white chocolate, caramel and peanut butter swirled with the classic semisweet chocolate. They have two new flavors out now: chocolate mint and chocolate raspberry.

Of the two, the chocolate mint is the better option. The green color isn't the most appealing thing to find in a cookie, but the mint flavor is great in a chocolate cookie and mint chips aren't something you see to often.

Raspberry chips aren't something you see too often either - and for good reason. They taste like stale chocolate with cherry flavoring, though they smell heavily of artificial raspberry. It's possible that the flavor will blend in better once the chips are baked into a cookie, but I am finding it difficult to bring myself to use the raspberry chips.

There is also a red-and-green swirled white chocolate holiday chip that Nestle has put out for the holiday season. The colors, again, look a bit odd in a cookie, but the overall effect is quite festive and as long as you like white chocolate chips, you'll like them.

After months and months of green and white tea based products, including Enviga, green tea lattes and even green tea vodka, some beverage companies are starting to go back to black teas as the inspiration for their drinks. Nestle and Coca Cola announced this week that they would be concentrating their joint venture project on black tea-based beverages after the group has rolled out Enviga in Europe in early 2007.

The green tea craze was all in the name of the various health benefits that have been attributed to it. Black tea is still a consumer favorite, however, and now there are studies that have shown that drinking any kind of tea can be good for your health, so there is no reason to stay away from it as a drink option. On top of that, green tea seems to have oversaturated the market for the time being and people are probably ready for a change. It will be interesting to see what the group comes up with, since green tea drinks tended to be far more innovative than the average flavored ice tea and perhaps some of the inspiration for those drinks will be applied to black teas now.

What happens when you get a world-renowned pastry chef and chocolatier to do a taste test with mass-produced chocolate bars? New York Magazine got François Payard to participate in a blind tasting of 14 nationally available chocolates. And while this test isn't completely recent, having taken place over a year ago, it's still interesting to see how your own personal preferences stack up to those of a pro.

The candy bars tasted were Dove Milk Chocolate, Hershey's Milk Chocolate, Caramello, Ferro Rocher, Nestle Crunch, York Peppermint Patties, Junior Mints, Snickers, Baci, Cadbury Dairy Milk, M&Ms (a rather obvious entry, easily identified), Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Toblerone and Kit Kats.

While a few garnered a "terrible" rating, like Hershey's and Ferro Rocher, Payard liked Dove, Caramello, Nestle Crunch and Snicker's. I still like Junior Mints and York Peppermint Patties, whether they have an "artificial" quality or not. Payard's favorite was the Baci, which he deemed to be "the most delicious" of all the chocolates he tasted. How did your favorite do?

[Thanks Anna!]

The Seattle PI held an informal bakeoff that pitted three types of chocolate against each other in a recipe for chocolate decadence cookies, which are so rich, they're basically brownies in cookie form. They used Nestle's Tollhouse chocolate chips, Baker's Chocolate and expensive Sharffen Berger chocolate.

Both the Nestle Tollhouse cookie and the Baker's beat out the high-end chocolate cookie.

Unfortunately, the whole article is approached with what sounds like complete disdain for anything other than the Sharffen Berger chocolate, which is a shame. The fact that it didn't win doesn't mean that the palates of the taste testers weren't sophisticated enough to like expensive chocolates over less expensive chocolates; it means that the testers didn't think Sharffen Berger in particular stacked up. Many people who love chocolate, even very dark chocolates, don't like the unusually bitter notes that are found in the SB chocolates. And for a cookie that has decadence in the name, very few people are going to prefer something that actually tastes bitter (not just bittersweet) over something that tastes rich, chocolaty and sweet.

All in all, the Sharffen Berger cookies were probably still very good, but this little bakeoff just reaffirms the fact that it doesn't really matter what kind of chocolate you use for baking. Save your expensive chocolate for eating on its own.

The Decadence Cookie recipe can be found here.

KitKats have long been one of the top-selling candy bars in Britain since their inception in 1935 by Rowntree LTD. The brand has been owned by Nestle since 1988, and Nestle increased its global distribution, making it one of the most popular candies in the world. To appeal to different tastes in different markets, Nestle has been producing flavored KitKats for many years now. These have enjoyed great success, particularly in Asian and Australian markets. The Wikipedia entry lists more than 65 different flavors of KitKat.

After having success elsewhere, Nestle turned to these limited edition and exotic flavors in the UK, with releases that ranged from strawberries and cream to mango to "Christmas pudding" all over the course of one year. They flopped. And not only did the flavors not sell, but KitKat sales in general fell by almost 17%. Galaxy bars saw an 11% increase in the same time period, largely making up the deficit in the number of bars sold.

The problem was that the bars were "not what [people] expected" from KitKats and the novelty wasn't enough to sustain sales. People purchased the flavored bars and lost interest in them, as well as being slightly turned off the original because the market was so saturated with KitKats. The flavors have been discontinued and the company is going to refocus on making up lost ground.

Hershey's, which owns the rights to the candy bar in the US, has released very few limited edition flavors, sticking primarily to white chocolate and dark chocolate. The company is unlikely to try a wide variety of flavors in the US because candy bar sales are not nearly as strong as in the UK. The company is, however, planning a caramel KitKat towards the end of this year.

[via WSJ]