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Trader Joe’s:

Like their milk chocolate brethren on our shelves, our Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are made with real peanut butter that’s made with slowly roasted and ground Virginia peanuts. The luscious, smooth, rich, dark chocolate enveloping that peanut butter is crafted from high quality cacao beans. Other purveyors of peanut butter cups fill theirs with all kinds of “extraneous” ingredients. Ours are free of such things. We eschew artificial flavors and preservatives, as well as colors other than those derived from natural sources. We’re quite certain they taste better our way.

Trader Joe’s speaketh the truth and throweth some shade.

Update: In the name of science, I tried both.

Brad Reese, on LinkedIn last week:

My grandfather, H. B. Reese (Who Invented Reese’s), built Reese’s on a simple, enduring architecture: Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter. Not a flavor idea. Not a marketing construct. A real, tangible product identity that consumers have trusted for a century.

But today, Reese’s identity is being rewritten, not by storytellers, but by formulation decisions that replace Milk Chocolate with compound coatings and Peanut Butter with peanut‑butter‑style crèmes across multiple Reese’s products.

The Associated Press:

Hershey said Wednesday that Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are made the same way they always have been, with milk chocolate and peanut butter that the company makes itself from roasted peanuts and a few other ingredients, including sugar and salt. But some Reese’s ingredients vary, Hershey said.

“As we’ve grown and expanded the Reese’s product line, we make product recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes and innovations that Reese’s fans have come to love and ask for, while always protecting the essence of what makes Reese’s unique and special: the perfect combination of chocolate and peanut butter,” the company said.

Brad Reese said he thinks Hershey went too far. He said he recently threw out a bag of Reese’s Mini Hearts, which were a new product released for Valentine’s Day. The packaging notes that the heart-shaped candies are made from “chocolate candy and peanut butter crème,” not milk chocolate and peanut butter.

“It was not edible,” Reese told The Associated Press in an interview. “You have to understand. I used to eat a Reese’s product every day. This is very devastating for me.”

Enshittification came for Reese’s Cups (along with just about everything else Hershey makes) long ago. Both the “milk chocolate” and “peanut butter” require dick quotes around them. Compare and contrast the taste — and ingredients list — to the peanut butter cups from, say, Justin’s (who also makes them with dark chocolate).