Toblerone has changed the shape of its bars and it's frankly outrageous

I’m saying this in my gravest, most severe voice; the voice I’d use if I got hired to do the announcement that someone had gone nuclear and you had two minutes to say goodbye to all your loved ones: Toblerone are fucking you. They’re fucking me, too. Worse, they’re fucking our families. At Christmas, no less.

The choc makers have ‘changed the shape’ of their famous triangular chocolate bar. And here by ‘change the shape’ they actually mean ‘given you less triangles, for the same price’. They’ve taken a chocolate bar fashioned after the majestic Swiss Alps and made it look like a bike rack. You could use this new, worse Toblerone to organise your desk. Keep some important documents in between its chocolatey grooves.

The company have defended the barbarous amputation of their bars on their Facebook: “we had to make a decision between changing the shape of the bar, and raising the price. We chose to change the shape to keep the product affordable for our customers, and it enables us to keep offering a great value product.”

See, what Toblerone have done here is reduced the weight of their 400g and 170g chocolate to 360g and 150g respectively, and claimed this ‘enables them to keep offering a great value product.’ They’ve even claimed it wasn’t done ‘as a result of Brexit’. They have given you less value, for the exact same price. And rather than trying to disguise this by making the bar the same shape but subtly smaller, it’s just made it look like someone’s just pre-eaten bits of the original bar. They’re fucking you and they’re not even trying to hide it. “Look,” Toblerone are saying. “This space here, this void, this absence of triangle, that’s where chocolate used to be.”

So you see, Toblerone are fucking everyone. But there is small reprieve in this: they’re also fucking themselves. 

Then again, could you look your beloved mother in the eye and say, with all sincerity, that you love Toblerone? More than any other chocolate bar?

No. You could not. Who buys Toblerone outside of duty free airports and as a novelty Christmas stocking filler? Nobody. You can buy little ones in shops, but you leave them there. Why? Because they’re an extremely mediocre chocolate.

The chocolate itself is fine. It’s not bad, but it’s not a luxury chocolate. You wouldn’t have it as your last meal, is all I’m saying. And I’m convinced that, unless you have the resilient teeth of a child, Toblerone chocolate is the most painful to bite on the entire market. Admittedly, all of the enamel on my adult teeth fell away like Forrest Gump’s leg braces came off in that bit where he learns to run, but this only means my hyper-sensitive pearlies are a better barometer than most.

Then there’s the second issue: the triangles are annoying as hell. They’re unwieldy. They aren’t a pleasant shape to eat. It forces you to either break each triangle into smaller chunks, taking bites that make your teeth scream in anguish, or else house them unchanged and uncomfortable on your tongue, where they jab at the roof and gums.

But I would endure this, because every time I had Toblerone, it was a gift from a relative, and it symbolised more than just mere cocoa beans moulded into a funny shape. It was a token of their love, or at least proof that they had remembered I existed at the last minute. Now I’ll know that they simply haven’t done their market research. Or that they have, and just don’t care about my chocolate experience enough to shop around for a better brand. Because of Toblerone’s new shape, I will know which members of my family don’t love me. So thanks for that, Toblerone, what a wonderful Christmas this will be.