When Steve brings home specialty chocolate bars, I rarely refuse at most half a bar. We both love ginger flavor in just about anything.
The crystallized texture was there, and a little reminiscent of the crystals one feels on the mouth when eating grana padano cheese, but the ginger flavor was absolutely missing.
That leads me to believe that the bar was old. A lot of these gourmet/specialty-type food products don’t sell quickly, and who checks dates or would even know the codes that different manufacturers use to let one know a product is outdated?
In fact, it appears that the purpose might be to deceive the buyer as to when it becomes outdated. Otherwise, why not put it clear as day, where people can see, read and understand it? Not too difficult, unless the purpose is as I said to deceive.
Store clerks never check dates. It’s up to the customer to point it out. But if the customer can’t figure it out or find it, then what?
Although the candy bar was good, I feel cheated. These aren’t cheap.
I saved the wrapper. Upon further inspection of all the data on the wrapper I found something that said APP until looking further and it said APR. Now I’m thinking April, then 201 PULL DATE. 201? Must not be a pull date, until looking closer and I found 9 in the border of another color (green) on the packaging. 2019.
Well now, there really is something wrong with that candy bar beyond its misidentified as old by its lack of ginger flavor. It’s well within the pull date, so should have tasted like ginger. Hot and spicy is how they described the ginger, which as I indicated was missing.
I don’t want to be eating candy anyway. I already spent way too much time on this.
There is a problem, however, industry-wide with specialty items, notably vegan items that stores keep beyond their pull dates, thinking if it’s vegan it must not be perishable, because it doesn’t contain any animal products. This of course isn’t true. So store managers need to be educated and the distributors need to do the educating, or the companies that sell the products need to do it. I’m not expecting any action on this, since to sell a product one doesn’t want to start talking pull dates and spoilage.
I won’t buy this product again. I don’t know how ginger gets old, since I have powdered ginger in my pantry at least two years old and it’s still strong-flavored.
In the photo, up close, the pull date becomes more obvious.
AFC BULL MARKET KITCHEN™ FREEDOM ON A PLATE 