Chocolate Lawsuit Stinks Like Hershey Highway Robbery
Think you’re paying too much for a candy bar? Regional grocer Giant Eagle does, and they’re suing the manufacturers to put a stop to this chocolate chicanery.
Hershey Co., Mars Inc., Nestle SA and Cadbury Schweppes Plc are accused of fixing chocolate candy prices in the U.S. in a lawsuit filed by a Pittsburgh supermarket chain.
Giant Eagle Inc. claims in a suit filed March 26 that the companies and a Canadian wholesalers’ network, Itwal Inc., conspired to set artificially high prices for chocolates in violation of U.S. antitrust law.
The companies’ profits have fallen “because of increasing health concerns, and changing consumer preferences,” Giant Eagle claimed in its complaint, filed in federal court in Pittsburgh. “In the face of waning demand, defendants responded by instituting uniform parallel price increases” in the U.S. beginning in 2002, Giant Eagle claimed. (Ed.: emphasis mine)
Giant Eagle said in the complaint that it paid more than $200 million to buy chocolate bars, boxed chocolates and seasonal chocolate candy from the companies since 2002, at illegally inflated prices. Giant Eagle seeks unspecified damages, which may be tripled under antitrust law if the claim is successful.
More here. Suit here (PDF). The U.S. Dept. of Justice is also probing alleged price fixing by chocolate makers.
My 2 cents? Giant Eagle is full of crap. By noting chocolate bars’ “health concerns” and “waning demand,” the suit does nothing but tarnish the very products Giant Eagle sells. Sour grapes, if you ask me.
If the candy costs you too much, is unhealthy, and doesn’t sell very well, why the hell are you selling it, Giant Eagle? As for the U.S. government, the idea that there is such a thing as chocolate price fixing, and that this is something government attorneys would need to concern themselves with, shows just how big Big Brother really is.
Easter Treat: Ferrero Rondnoir
In case you’ve reached the age where the Easter Bunny no longer leaves special little treats around your home this time of year — or the Purim Bunny just never seems to show up — I recommend you try the the newish Ferrero Rondnoir this weekend.
A Ferrero rep sent me some, which she’d described in an email as “new dark chocolates that feature a dark chocolate cream surrounding a crisp wafer and topped with crunchy dark chocolate morsels.”
Since I’m a firm believer in there being no such thing as too much dark chocolate, I was happy to give them a whirl. (I’m happy to try pretty much any food someone’s willing to send me, though maybe not anything with chreese in it.)
The Rondnoir has a lot going on, but not too much. It’s definitely crispy on the outside — crunchy, even, thanks to the coating of the outer chocolate bits — and when you bite into it the three levels of cocoa-rich dark chocolate, each with a different consistency, play nicely off one another.
Candyblog has more — including the sad revelation that the Rondnoir contains no trans fats.
Find the Rondnoir seller nearest you here. Or just pick up a bunch from Amazon.
