Easter Sundae M&Ms Feature Chocolate And Mysterious White Substance

Here at Consumerist, we love and love to hate novelty flavors of classic candies and cookies, like root beer float cookies or pumpkin spice latte M&Ms. The snack wizards over at M&M HQ now have to crank out multiple holiday flavors of their candy-coated chocolate treats every season, because different retailers want their own custom flavors. This year and this spring, they’re making “Easter Sundae” flavor for Walmart, which unfortunately isn’t much of a flavor.

The bag describes “Easter” as an artificial flavor, or perhaps the whole “Easter sundae” concept is an artificial flavor, which is less theologically troubling. The candies have chocolate just inside the shell, and inside that is what the bag describes as “white.” Not white chocolate: just white.

Perhaps it’s meant to taste like white chocolate, but doesn’t fit the Food and Drug Administration Standard of Identity for White Chocolate. That’s an actual thing, which has minimums for which foods are allowed to be called “white chocolate.” It needs to have 20% cocoa butter, for example, and 3.5% milkfat and 55% nutritive sweeteners (generally, sugar.) If the mysterious “white” falls short yet is still chocolate-ish and tasty, most shoppers probably won’t notice that the word “chocolate” is missing.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist