Butterfingers: Old artificial vs new "real"

When I heard Nestle was replacing all the artificial colors and flavors in its products with natural ingredients, I got excited. Not because I think that natural is automatically "better" than "chemical" flavors--but because there was an obvious opportunity for science (and an excuse for eating candy). So I went out as soon as I could and bought an artificial-flavor-filled, now discontinued Butterfinger bar, and put it in my dresser drawer for safe keeping.

Last week I went to the CVS and picked up a new, artificial-free Butterfinger bar. This weekend I recruited my mother, my mother's friend, and her two kids (one 10, one 5) to see if I could make a determination about whether there was any difference in the taste of the two bars.

Now, I would have loved to do a fully scientific procedure--triple-encrypted double blind, isolated tasting, quantitative scorecards, blindfolds, the whole shebang--but the kids really wanted to eat their candy, so the best I could do was a single-encryption double blind. I shooed everyone from the kitchen, unwrapped the candy bars, put them on two plates, one marked "A" and one marked "B", and recorded the position of each bar. Then I had the kids and their mom come in and decide whether to switch the bars or not, then to record their decision. Then I went back in the room and cut the bars up, and we sat down in the dining room to eat them.

Visually, there was a pretty obvious difference between the two. Bar A was a dull brown-orange color on the inside, where as Bar B was a startlingly bright orange. Sadly, it didn't occur to me to take pictures, but Bar B looked pretty much exactly like this:

My mother thought that Bar B was artificial and that it tasted better. My mother's friend thought that Bar A was artificial, but that Bar B tasted better. I forget which bar I thought was more artificial, but Bar B definitely tasted better to me, too. It was rich, nutty, and buttery, just like a Butterfinger is supposed to be. Bar A tasted like milk chocolate on nondescript cookie filler. The kids were too busy getting-sugar high to have any opinions, or at least any they were willing to waste time stuffing their faces to tell us about.

Bar A was natural, and Bar B was artificial. I think I am going to have to mourn the artificial Butterfinger's discontinuation, or hope that the folks at Nestle come up with a better-tasting formula. It was basically my favorite candy bar--but it's lost it's privileged place, now, because it's not the same. RIP, Butterfingers.