Even if you only eat them from the mini bar in hotel rooms, you can recognize a Toblerone bar from a mile away. Those chocolate triangles lined up in formation, presenting themselves for consumption. The shape is iconic. And now, it kind of sucks.
Toblerone recently unveiled a new, less chocolatey version of some of their UK bars as part of a cost-cutting effort. The trademark zipper design has been replaced with less peaks and more valleys; something that looks like a candy thief ate half your snack.
The new Toblerone makes for a nice device stand pic.twitter.com/T1okTEo9fP
— Alolan Nyarth (@nyarth) November 10, 2016
Hey @Toblerone is Brexit impacting you? Half the peaks are missing #toblerone #devistated pic.twitter.com/Huo9hI0eyN
— Libby Coe (@LIBBYCOE) November 5, 2016
The 400g Toblerone bar is now 360g and the 170g is now 150g (and widely sold in Britain).
Via Facebook, the company explains:
…like many other companies, we are experiencing higher costs for numerous ingredients. We carry these costs for as long as possible, but to ensure Toblerone remains on-shelf, is affordable and retains the triangular shape, we have had to reduce the weight of just two of our bars in the UK, from the wider range of available Toblerone products.
Toblerone goes on to say that they either had to decrease the size or increase the price. They chose the former, but still charge the same. Of course, this sparked some online drama from UK customers who felt like they’d been duped.
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It looks like a really underhanded thing to do. You buy a bar expecting a normal bar and it looks like you are getting half the chocolate.
Dear Toblerone, you had to make a choice between raising the price, reducing the size or becoming a laughing-stock, for some outtatouch reason you chose the latter?
You idiots could have just taken off one piece off the bar and retained the shape. That is, unless there is something even more fishy behind this change than just dropping 10-15 % of the chocolate. This new shape looks ridiculous and appalling.
Ricky Gervais offers this sobering conspiracy theory:
Don’t be fooled people.
All this stuff in America is just to bury the news about the new Toblerone.— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) November 9, 2016
This is the first time Toblerone has changed the shape of its bar since its inception in 1908.
Toblerone is a Swiss chocolate brand owned by Mondelez International (originally Kraft Foods). Produced in Bern, Switzerland, sometimes manufactured elsewhere in the past, and planned to be made in Slovakia from the end of 2023. Toblerone is known for its distinctive shape, a series of joined triangular prisms and lettering engraved in the chocolate.