Cocoa Via is hardly new. It’s so not-new, it’s not worth listing all the Web sites who’ve mentioned it. The basic premise - “chocolate that’s good for you” - never appealed. what’s the point of that? but it showed up at SuperT and was thus easy to buy. anyway, made by Mars/Dove (and the color scheme is very similar to Dove), it brags about its “cocoapro process” (and they even ® it to let you know it’s special). saying it retains flavanols “to help promote healthy circulation”. hmf. take a look at the pic. there is 1. a cardboard box. and inside 2. a cardboard shelf. on which rest the five bars. over them lies 3. a piece of double-layered glued cardboard. MUCH packaging. and what do you actually get, chocolate-wise? 5 wee .71-oz bars. maybe the size of a single twix. a box of 5 costs $5.99. or $1.20 per stick. now, admittedly, this is no noka. but it’s still a helluva lot of $$. as for the flavor - it’s dark choc and not very sweet. but you have to wonder: what exactly ARE “soy sterol esters“?

pls forgive the presence of yet-another item on yet-another ltd-edition seasonal mint sweet, but it seems best to get them done w/ and this one’s unique in its class: Hershey’s Candy Cane Kisses, a white-choc kiss w/ crunchy candy bits mixed within. they’re unique enough that it’s easy to keep eating them, possibly even beyond the point where you still like them. but - and let me state the obvious here - they’re good 4 people who like mint. anyway, see, that wasn’t so bad, and now next wk can start fresh w/ fully-linked items on new restaurants (a new sushi place in richardson), ice creams (bluebell’s doing French vanilla cappuccino), & maybe coffee drinks (dunkin donuts just intro’d a very starbucksian “gingerbread latte”)

was there ever a product that begged more for the silly snowflake-frame photo treatment?

Of all the kit kats that have cometh before, none surpasses this ltd edition mint dark chocolate. (which is why the kk sabbatical is broken yet again.) but this kit kat warrants it. It has the same piercing mint + dark choc you get from york pep patties & junior mints but not as sugary, thanks to the superior qual of kit kat’s dark choc (which is also less “greasy” than the usual kit kat milk choc). And, as is evident in foto #2, the choc is thick. a superior seasonal prod and kit kat flavor too

Le Petit Ecolier white choc cookies reveal what a strict taskmistress innovation can be. there was the little schoolboy, happy for 150+ yrs in his French milieu as a butter biscuit topped w/ a slab of milk choc. Then mkt forces intruded and he was forced to welcome a baby brother: a spinoff in dark choc. Not enough. So the parent co. spawned another sibling, EXTRA dark choc. Still not enough. so now: white choc. (there’s also been a couplo bastard cousins: hazelnut & crisped rice.) This white choc is pleasingly not too sweet; but all Le Petit Ecoliers are good - not too many ingredients and they use butter (vs. butter-flavored hydrogenated oil).

not sure if you’ve caught wind of the rumor going around – it’s about dark choc stopmeifyou’veheardit that it’s good for you. all those dark choc items you’ve seen aren’t even the tip of the iceberg. stats!:
$ one third of the new choc items this year are dark - up from 1/4 in 2005, sez Datamonitor’s Productscan Online
$ new dark-choc prods have already hit 278 this year (279 if you count today’s blog item?) (and it’s only sept!), compared to a total last year of 217
$ Sales of dark choc are up 40% this year, sez Ad Age, driven by reports that the antioxidants make it heart healthy
in that area, Nestle dark raisinets scores 2-for-1, cuz raisins have antioxidants too. this 11-oz foil package claims to have 7 servings, w/ 180 cal, 32 carbs, 8 grams of fat

They were free-sampling these last nite over at nokia, thus providing me w/ an instant blog item: mint choc chip pop tarts. so what, right? except that the mktg campaign for these is all about eating them frozen; the pop-tart peeps were handing them out ice-cold (from a retro-looking fridge). other priorities prevented me from eating it on the spot, as served, icy-cold (and besides, it seemed vital to get it home unscathed for a pic); after sampling it at room temp, I just hope it tastes better cold. Talk about sweet. Yuck. But how clever to push it as a snack competing w/ ice cream/novelty items, potentially expanding the pop-tart audience past the breakfast crowd.

Pepp farm duz so many new prods, they could star in their own blog. Most of it’s just Another New Flavor of Milano, but the Chocolate Delight line is semi-unique cuz 1/2 the 6 flavors are avail at Target only. That includes Marbella, choc cookies w/ a “rich choc layer” & choc cappuccino “crunchies”; and 2 others, mint & amaretto. if you can’t get to target, shed no tears; the choc tastes fake, like frosting, and the “crunchies” taste like ash. Celebrate instead that the Choc Raspberry Rialto, another in the line with a choc sandwich & raspberry filling that‘s a little better, is avail everywhere

Haven’t visited kisses in a while (e.g., totally, willfully, arbitrarily skipped the special ed coconut-creme kiss) so let’s do Hershey a huge freaking favor w/ this puny blog item on their dark-choc choco truffle kiss. an ooey-gooey soft-centered version of their now-year-round solid dark-choc kiss. Dark choc wuz already a blooming flavor trend, but then a study decreed that its antioxidants make dark choc “good for you”, and now it’s off the hook, not so diff from the oat bran craze in the 90s. other pertinent examples: 1. How bout the fact that dark-choc M&Ms just got bumped up to the year-round team? 2. How bout carnation adding a new dark choc flavor to its instant-breakfast mix, which was a totally cool new product if you happened to be growing up in new England in the 70s.

*no links, sorry, back in the groove, blah blah blah

It appears that the mgr of the Indian/pastry shop - which was gonna be today’s item - isn’t gonna call me back (doesn’t he realize how important NYCE is???), so this new prod is a last-minute sub-out, one sufficiently odd to make fun of: M-Azing minis: “individually-wrapped bite-sized choc candies w/ m&ms minis mixed in”. How insane is this? 1. They take m&ms, originally devised w/ a candy shell so you could eat them out of hand. 2. Shrink them. 3. Stir into choc (a bar form exists of this). 4. Make that bite-sized and wrap in foil. Nuts! Maybe it’s to compete w/ the hershey’s kiss? Anyway, it comes in 2 flavs, PB & crunchy, and as long as we’re kissing m&m’s ass, they’ve launched (the previously special-edition-only) dark-choc m&ms as a year-round product.

now that the dark choc trend has about peaked, w/ everybody & his brother doing fancy dark-choc bars that are purportedly good for you, here’s more of the same: ghirardelli intense dark gourmet choc bars*. ghirardelli is the pride of SF – its factory is a big tourist hang - but its choc’s never been all that. but when everyone else started doing better-quality choc, it did finally cave in w/its worthy 60% choc chips. so rah rah for them. These bars come in 4 flavors: espresso, toffee, orange, & plain – and have G’s signature square format, just fused in a bar form

*and btw, I know these aren’t brand new but I finally bought one and took a pic