Hershey Kissables were a chocolate candy sold by The Hershey Company

The Hershey Company

The Hershey Company, known until April 2005 as the Hershey Foods Corporation and commonly called Hershey's, is the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America. Its headquarters are in Hershey, Pennsylvania, which is also home to Hershey's Chocolate World. It was founded by Milton S...

 from late 2005 to 2009. Comparable to M&Ms, Hershey Kissables were shaped like miniature Hershey's Kisses and were coated in a thick sugar shell.

The basic colors were red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Holiday versions were also made in pastels for Easter, pink and white for Valentines, and red and green for Christmas. In mid-2007 Hershey's introduced a dark chocolate version called Kissables Dark, which featured more subdued colors and a semi-sweet interior.

Hershey ceased production of Kissables in July 2009, according to a customer service representative at the Hershey Company.

Ingredient changes to reduce production costs

In 2007, the Hershey Company began to change the ingredients of some of its products to replace the relatively expensive cocoa butter

Cocoa butter

Cocoa butter, also called theobroma oil, is a pale-yellow, pure edible vegetable fat extracted from the cocoa bean. It is used to make chocolate, biscuits, and baked goods, as well as some pharmaceuticals, ointments, and toiletries...

 with cheaper fats. Hershey's changed the description of the product from "candy coated milk chocolate" to "chocolate candy" and altered the packaging and product ingredients. According to United States Food and Drug Administration

Food and Drug Administration

The Food and Drug Administration is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the United States federal executive departments...

  food labeling

Mandatory labelling

Mandatory labelling or labeling is the requirement of consumer products to state their ingredients or components....

 laws, these modified recipes could not be legally described as milk chocolate.

The ingredients in 2005 were: milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, nonfat milk, milk fat, lactose

Lactose

Lactose is a disaccharide sugar that is found most notably in milk and is formed from galactose and glucose. Lactose makes up around 2~8% of milk , although the amount varies among species and individuals. It is extracted from sweet or sour whey. The name comes from or , the Latin word for milk,...

, soy lecithin, PGPR, and artificial flavors), sugar, red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6, blue 1, and carnauba wax

Carnauba wax

Carnauba , also called Brazil wax and palm wax, is a wax of the leaves of the palm Copernicia prunifera, a plant native to and grown only in the northeastern Brazilian states of Piauí, Ceará, and Rio Grande do Norte. It is known as "queen of waxes" and usually comes in the form of hard yellow-brown...

.

In 2007, the ingredients were changed to: Sugar, vegetable oil (palm, shea, sunflower and/or safflower oil), chocolate, nonfat milk, whey, cocoa butter, milk fat, gum arabic

Gum arabic

220px|thumb|right|Acacia gumGum arabic, also known as acacia gum, chaar gund, char goond, or meska, is a natural gum made of hardened sap taken from two species of the acacia tree; Acacia senegal and Acacia seyal...

, soy lecithin, artificial colors (red 40, yellow 5, blue 2, blue 1, yellow 6), corn syrup, resinous glaze, salt, carnauba wax, PGPR and vanillin.