Quality Street My Arse!

I hate being treated as an idiot by a big corporation, so when I was handed a box of Quality Street today, I knew I’d have to find five minutes to sit down, brood, and then write about the stinging wart on the behind of the British confectionery industry.

Those damn heathens, wearing their sheep’s testicle necklaces and waving dead chickens over piles of fuming herbs, they have gone and done it again. Nestlé have introduced two new chocolates to the Quality Street family. And what might those two new chocolates be, you ask? Do you anticipate the ‘Mint Sensation’, a mint cream wrapped in dark chocolate? Or maybe it’s that ‘Lemon zest’, a lemon flavoured cream in milk chocolate? Or you might not like soft centers, so how about a Hazelnut Blob, or a Walnut Whizz, or a bloody Nougat Knob?! No, no, and no. Apparently this is all too obvious to the witch doctors at Nestlé. Not when they can introduce the world to the taste sensation that is the ‘Milk Choc Block’ and, wait for it, ‘The Toffee Deluxe’. The Toffee Deluxe! I feel ulcers bursting in the sugary corner of my digestive tract. What the hell is ‘deluxe’ about caramel? It’s burnt sugar! How much more cheap could an ingredient be?

Every person on the planet knows that caramel is the most miserable substance on the earth. The devil god of confectioners created when he was cast from Belgium. Buy a tin of Quality Street at Christmas and you can guarantee that by New Year’s Day there’ll be nothing but Toffee Pennies left at the bottom. So why introduce another toffee we are all sure to avoid? It says on the box: ‘Indulge yourself with toffee deluxe – our rich, buttery toffee wrapped in smooth milk chocolate’. Give me a break! Come on, Nestlé, I’m sure you could save yourself another fraction of a penny per box by taking space up with another cheap-to-produce lump of flavourless gunk? What the world needs now is another version of the Caramel Keg! Your copywriters can make something scraped from a kennel sound exciting. ‘Why not treat yourself to the Doggy Delight, a luxurious lump of faeces wrapped in a delicious dark chocolate’?

As for ‘the choc block’, it’s chocolate wrapped in chocolate. There can be nothing cheaper unless they wrap air, which, let’s face it, is what they do every Christmas and Easter when the thickness of the chocolate in novelties and eggs get thinner and thinner. A ‘choc bloc’ is hardly a confectionery innovation and I’m damn sure it doesn’t excite me when they advertise it on the box in lovely clip art stars with ‘New’ in glowing letters. As for it being ‘a bite sized block of creamy milk chocolate’… Bite sized? For who? A midget, perhaps, or a small Persian cat. A one year old baby with a very tiny jaw.

I get so utterly fed up of corporations selling us things with words that attempt to disguise reality. Small cars are ‘compact’, ugly cars are ‘exciting’ or ‘innovative’. When Renault launched the Megane, they disguised the fact it has a terrible rear by showing us images of women's bottoms. The car was still ugly but like one of Ivan Pavlov's dogs, I now drool every time I see one drive past.

Nestlé operate their ‘new cholocate’ scam so they can these cheap ‘new’ chocolates we’d never choose to eat take up space that was previously occupied by chocolates you might actually enjoy. How many Orange Creams, Strawberry Creams, and the Hazelnuts do they save with this little example of penny-pinching? We’re being screwed on a global scale. Sod ethical business practices and all the stuff that gets Mark Thomas’ goat. What about being able to buy a decent box of reasonably priced chocolates? I don’t eat chocolate that often and when I do I usually prefer something expensive but delicious, even it is means only having a very small quantity. Don’t give me fudge! I hate fudge! And don’t call it a ‘fondant center’ when you mean fudge. I just want to share a box of chocolates with my family knowing that I'm not going to have to elbow my own mother in the face just to get to the orange cream.

Nestlé, I’m onto your game, you cheap miserable bastards. The Chipster says wake up and smell the cocoa.