2 days Ago By [email protected] (Brian Boone)
It's positively magical how pairs of some disparate, completely unrelated foods just naturally fit together, their differing tastes and textures mixing and complementing one another to result in something brand new and fantastic. Consider, for example, fried chicken and waffles, bacon and eggs, and chocolate and . In the early 20th century, Reese's candy company (later purchased by and absorbed into Hershey's) figured out that a sugary, creamy peanut butter marvelously meshed well with chocolate.
The result: the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, a shell of chocolate concealing the peanut butter filling. Reese's is consistently one of the best-selling candies on the planet. Hershey has spent decades aggressively trying to extend the Reese's brand, bringing the chocolate and peanut butter combo, or just a sweet nut sensation, to many other candies and snacks.
Sometimes, as with Reese's Pieces or jars of Reese's peanut butter, it's worked out well. Other times, its offerings have flopped with the general public. Here are some of the many Reese's products that didn't hit the same way as the original Peanut Butter Cup and probably won't ever return to the candy aisle.
Reese's Double Chocolate The whole idea behind Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, the flagship candy in the Reese's brand, is to celebrate the interplay between chocolate and peanut butter. It's the unique style of the latter — peanut butter, but sweeter and grainier than the stuff found in a jar — that makes Reese's products so special. Without it, it's just chocolate, which is exceedingly common and not very interesting, particularly because Reese's chocolate is fairly generic on its own.
For some reason, in 2006 Reese's removed its trademark ingredient with the Reese's Double Chocolate, which was released as a limited edition confection. The candy looked like a standard Reese's Peanut Butter Cup from the outside with its hard chocolate shell. But on the inside, it was filled with chocolate-flavored peanut butter.
Reese's Double Chocolate candy didn't sell very well, and it didn't last on store shelves much beyond 2006. It was almost as bad as when for leaving out a trademark ingredient. Reese's Peanut Butter Lovers In 2007, a year after Reese's Double Chocolate cups came and went in a hurry, in came Reese's Peanut Butter Lovers.
The cups weren't completely free of chocolate. A thin coating held up the bottom and part of the outer sides before giving way to a hard, sweet peanut butter-flavored shell. All of that housed the familiar sweet and luscious Reese's peanut butter in the middle, the same as one would find in the original version.
It still couldn't fully compete with a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, however, because this brand is all about the interplay between peanut butter and chocolate in just the right ratio rather than leaning too heavily into one flavor or the other. In 2013, Reese's revived and revised the long-since deleted Peanut Butter Lovers Cup and created the Ultimate Peanut Butter Lovers Edition. This one lived up to its name in that there was no chocolate anywhere in the recipe.
That product is gone, too, although Hershey has since licensed out the brand name and the concept to protein bar manufacturer One, which makes a low-carb, high-protein bar flavored with the chocolate-free Peanut Butter Cup. Reese's Whipps While it's lumped in with, and often referred to as a "candy bar," the main Reese's product isn't a bar at all — the treat is a two-or-three-bite cup, sold two or four to a single-serving-size pack. Nearly 80 years after the introduction of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups — — the peanut butter-meets-chocolate idea made its way into a branded bar called Reese's Whipps.
Not merely the same idea as the Peanut Butter Cup made thicker, longer, and rectangular, the chocolate outside was instead stuffed with a peanut butter-flavored filling. As the name "Whipps" implied, the middle was a whipped, airy nougat with a texture similar to that of a 3 Musketeers bar but with only a faint wisp of peanut flavoring and less sugar than what could be found in a comparable serving of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. In the 2010s, Reese's discontinued Reese's Whipps, and what stock remained steadily ran out.
A Change.org petition asking Hershey's to bring back Whipps garnered only slightly more than 500 supporters, and the candy company didn't respond to the request. Reese's Whipps are probably gone for good.
Reese's Hazelnut Creme Cups When a candy is made up of little more than chocolate and peanut butter, there aren't a lot of things to change or improve. It seems like a foregone conclusion then that Reese's would and could experiment by using butter made from nuts besides peanuts and create any number of new variants of its Peanut Butter Cup. It's also somewhat of a bold and foolhardy move for Reese's, so associated with peanut and peanut butter candy, to produce something that didn't contain that crucial ingredient.
Regardless, in 2008 Reese's Hazelnut Creme Cups hit stores across the United States. Notable for a nutty flavor that mixed well with chocolate, Reese's Hazelnut Creme Cups were compared to jarred chocolate hazelnut paste, but in candy form and with different textures. Perhaps this ambitious candy was just too exotic for consumers or off the mark for its manufacturer because it sold poorly enough to earn a quiet discontinuation.
Reese's Whoppers Since it acquired the long-standing Whoppers brand in 1996, Hershey's has routinely incorporated the biggest name in malted milk balls into its portfolio of candies, occasionally introducing new flavors and creative mash-ups. In 2008, it rolled out Whoppers Reese's Malted Milk Balls. Each of the well-known candies contributed one of the two signature elements for which each is known — a peanut-flavored Reese's shell and a milky Whoppers interior made from .
In creating the merger, Hershey's candy makers dropped all of the chocolate. Sold in milk carton-like packages to anticipate and encourage repeated eating, they tasted like a nutty milkshake if a little waxy, and only a little reminiscent of the Reese's line of products. In the end, both Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Whoppers each have a loyal consumer base, and both seemed content with their non-combined candies.
Hershey's discontinued the ambitious bite-sized candies not long after bringing them into stores. Reese's Spreads Snacksters Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are merely one of the most famous and well-liked entries in the universe of sugary, nut-based snacks. In Europe for decades, and increasingly in the U.
S. in recent years, chocolate hazelnut spread is a pantry staple, such as Nutella, one of . Reese's sought to compete with that product by making a similarly smooth and sweet spreadable topping made with chocolate and peanut paste instead of the hazelnut blend.
Then it put that stuff into one of two compartments in a plastic cup and some graham cracker-like cookie sticks into the other. The result: Reese's Spreads Snacksters, a dessert-oriented item perfect for lunchboxes or on-the-go eating reminiscent of Nabisco's line of Handi-Snacks. Extending Reese's reach from the candy space and into the snack zone, Reese's Spreads Snacksters made a debut in 2015 and survived for about a year.
Reese's general audience apparently didn't find the product to remind them much of the Peanut Butter Cup, and chocolate-flavored peanut butter with cookies represented too many broad leaps into unknown territory. Reese's Crunchy Cookie Cup In the 1980s and beyond, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were marketed with an ad campaign that imagined a fateful origin story for the candy — strangers bump into each other and their snacks collide. "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter," a woman says, to which a man replies, "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" In the late 1990s, Reese's added into the midst a third widely liked treat that can stand on its own: cookies.
Reese's Crunchy Cookie Cups took a run-of-the-mill Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and made some room in between the chocolate and the peanut butter for a thin, crispy cookie disc, not unlike one half of an Oreo. The product as presented back then was discontinued after failing to secure a broad consumer base. Reese's later returned to the idea with Reese's Stuffed with Crunchy Cookie Peanut Butter Cups.
Still sold by Hershey's, that candy presents the chocolate cookie as tiny bits swimming inside of the peanut butter center, rather than as one solid piece. Reese's Swoops Potato chips are almost universally beloved, and so are Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. It was a reasonable notion then for Reese's and Hershey's to devise a product that combined both of those undeniably delicious snacks.
In 2003, Reese's was just one flavor in a line released by Hershey's called Swoops. In a small, individually sized package, consumers received a stack of six potato chips, each completely enrobed in a thin film of flavored chocolate. Varieties included a standard Hershey Bar flavor, Almond Joy, York Peppermint Patty, and Reese's.
All Swoops, including the standard Reese's peanut butter-laced chocolate version as well as a white chocolate variant, came in a uniform shape, earning the product comparisons to Pringles. Along with a drizzle of brown peanut butter on top of each Swoop, the peanut butter flavor proved strong inside the chocolate coating, which mixed surprisingly well with the potato chip underneath, making for a salty and sweet treat with multiple textures. Unfortunately, though, it was a monumental failure for Hershey's, and all Swoops, including the Reese's flavors, ended production in 2006.
Reese's Flavor of Georgia Honey Roasted Peanut Butter Cups There's a strong culinary tradition of peanuts in Georgia, so it's understandable that Reese's would pull from that history to devise a brand new and innovative take on its Peanut Butter Cup. However, the venerable candy maker got it completely wrong. Residents of Georgia, by far the United States' most prolific producer of peanuts, prefer a variation dating back to the 19th century in which the nuts are boiled, providing a specific and unmistakable taste.
Boiled peanuts could be considered a "Flavor of Georgia," but when Reese's created the Flavor of Georgia Honey Roasted Peanut Butter Cups in 2017, it went with a honey-roasted peanut flavor profile instead, which isn't something that's widely connected with the state. Even then, Reese's didn't quite get the taste right. The Flavor of Georgia Honey Roasted Peanut Butter Cups failed to taste like honey-roasted peanuts, wielding only a mild honey flavoring.
What was really just an extra-sweet Reese's Peanut Butter Cup disappeared shortly after its launch. Reese's Peanut Butter and Banana Creme cups In 1977, Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. Thirty years later, Reese's decided to honor the late singer's legacy via the introduction of a special Peanut Butter Cup designed to imitate the flavor profile of one of Presley's favorite foods.
He enjoyed a sandwich from a Colorado restaurant called the Fool's Gold Loaf — peanut butter, bananas, and bacon on French bread. Reese's Peanut Butter and Banana Creme edition featured an illustration of Presley in his later years on the wrapper, and the candy inside didn't include bacon or bread, but it did employ a creamy banana paste. The common outer chocolate shell hid an inner layer of sweet peanut butter and a banana center.
Reese's never promised to keep the Peanut Butter and Banana Creme version around for long, marketing it as a limited edition item. While more than 2,000 fans of the candy signed a petition at iPetitions to get Hershey's to let the candy live, the Elvis-themed candy has left the building. Reese's Go for Gold! Considering that Reese's Go for Gold! was a tie-in product made specifically for the 2016 Summer Olympics, it doesn't seem like the candy will be returning anytime soon, at least not until another Olympiad is underway.
And even then, Go for Gold! was so poorly executed, overlooked, and barely marketed that few people are likely clamoring for it to once again enter the competitive candy market. In the run-up to the Olympics, Reese's promoted itself with the help of American gold medal winner Lindsey Vonn — confusingly a champion in the Winter Olympics — to launch its "Do Summer Like a Winter Olympian" campaign. Meanwhile, its marketing materials barely mentioned the limited edition Reese's Go for Gold! candy.
The product tasted exactly like regular Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and looked almost exactly like them, too. The only difference: Each cup bore a thin, barely legible, stick-figure-like line drawing of what were supposed to be Olympians doing track and field events, like running, pole vaulting, and jumping over hurdles. Reese's Inside Out When your world-famous and extremely well-liked candy is really only made up of two ingredients, there aren't all that many options for mixing up the recipe or the format.
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups consist, essentially, of chocolate and peanut butter. In 2004, Reese's flipped everything around, taking the chocolate from the outside and putting it on the inside, and then moving the peanut butter blend that was previously found on the inside and making the outer candy shell out of that. The result: Reese's Inside Out.
One would think that the differences between a standard Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and a Reese's Inside Out concoction would be superficial, as it's still a mix of chocolate and sweetened peanut butter. But the flavor was something totally new, with the powerful chocolate taste downplayed in favor of a peanut-like sensation more akin to Reese's Pieces than that familiar Reese's peanut butter filling. Reese's couldn't get much of a footing inside the candy world with Inside Out, but the novelty candy developed a devoted cult following.
In 2014, a Facebook campaign called "Bring Back Reese's Inside Out Peanut Butter Cups" was launched and quickly garnered 250 fans, which wasn't enough to get Hershey's or Reese's to restore the forgotten candy. White Creme Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with Reese's Pieces The Reese's Peanut Butter Cup marries two real foods: peanut butter and chocolate. White Creme Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with Reese's Pieces combined two things that pretended to be something they weren't — peanut-flavored but non-peanut-containing Reese's Pieces and white chocolate, which isn't technically chocolate.
In fact, just before this candy with the highly descriptive sentence for a name was introduced in 2020, Reese's manufacturer Hershey's was the subject of a lawsuit for misleading customers into thinking white chocolate was a style of chocolate. White Creme Reese's Peanut Butter Cups exist to this day in several versions, and they're virtually the same candy as White Creme Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with Reese's Pieces but without that extra, called-out ingredient. Both products feature a sugary, creamy, snappable candy surrounding that same old Reese's-style sweet, salty peanut butter.
The very specific candy with the other candy suspended inside of the peanut butter, was equally specific in its availability: Reese's distributed it exclusively through Dollar General stores. Recommended.
