NEAROF

The food world can be strange at times. Mergers and acquisitions can create strange bedfellows, with junk food companies owning health food brands, and competing products in the same category somehow winding up under the same roof. And so it has come to pass that one company – Nestlé – has, since the 1980s, owned […]

When most well-adjusted, liberty-loving North Americans think “chocolate chips,” it’s the classic cookie that comes to mind, not potato chips drenched in chocolate. And yet here we have Lay’s Wavy Milk Chocolate Covered Potato Chips, an idea that seems certain to have come from a skunk-scented apartment in the college part of town. More curious […]

It’s not every day you find a chocolate bar with “Carbon Dioxide” listed in the ingredients. As Dairy Milk continues in their frantic mission to add just about everything imaginable into a chocolate bar – toffee bits, cookie dough, pretzel chunks, cashews, coconut, etc. – this Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Candy bar stood […]

Over the years, I’ve tried M&M’s in all sorts of flavours and formats. Plain, peanut, peanut butter, pretzel, mint, coconut … . A few weeks ago, I even sampled some orange-flavoured M&M’s from Australia. This week, we’re back to another M&M’s flavour from that kangaroo-infested corner of the globe. Vanilla Shake, they say? Interesting. I’m […]

The first of several items from Australia that I’ll sample in August, these orange-flavoured M&M’s prove that Canada regularly misses out on interesting brand extensions in major candy and snack lines. The U.S. regularly gets these curious variants, but I’d assumed Australia was in the same boat as Canada with stuff like this. Apparently not. […]

The Swedish food market at Ikea is a must-visit whenever I get to the big blue-and-yellow box store. Aside: How much do I love Ikea? I’m typing this on an Ikea desk while sitting in an Ikea chair. Next to me are Ikea bookcases and an Ikea Poang chair. I could keep going (Ikea coat […]

God bless giant multinational corporations. With Kraft’s 2010 acquisition of beloved British confectionary mainstay Cadbury, which subsequently found itself under the Mondelez International brand, both the Dairy Milk family of chocolate bars and the Chips Ahoy! brand of supermarket cookies fell under the control of the same company. Some blessed soul (who, I’d hope, got […]

If you have any celiac friends, you already know how hard it is to find gluten-free things to eat at a restaurant or café. Every label must be read, and nothing can be left to chance. Asking a staffer if something is gluten-free is regularly met with blank stares, or, worse: incorrectly stated confirmation that […]