Ricoa Chocolate Syrup
Who among you love chocolate? Please raise your hands. For those who love it, do you enjoy taking it in syrup form, especially with things like ice cream? Another show of hands please. Now for those who also take it in syrup form, do you prefer it to be bitter tasting? A final show of hands please.
Wonderful! It looks like I’m in the right place!
Table of Contents
The Old King
For decades, the de facto standard for chocolate syrup here has an imported brand. And no, I won’t name it because after breezing through the three questions earlier, you will most likely know the one I am talking about.
So entrenched in the market, it has done away with competition even, notwithstanding the high price it commands. Such is the power of a good formulation. Sure, other brands have attempted to knock the king off it’s throne but they just cannot seem to get that bitter taste right. Some were cheaper; others came in bigger bottles; even a few had freebies or were packaged with other consumables. Yet the king stayed on top for decades.
I have been one of the king’s patrons for as long as I can remember, which is a pretty long time. When I was a child and didn’t have the means to acquire it, my mother would be the one to purchase it. When I grew up and got a job, it continued to be on my grocery list.
And while I have no complaints about the taste, the premium price it commanded always made a dent in my pocket. I’ll even go as far as to say that I’ve had to get smaller sized containers of ice cream just to be able to buy the imported brand.
The New King
That all ended a few years ago when I spotted Ricoa’s Chocolate Syrup on one of the shelves in my favorite grocery store. So I returned the imported brand to it’s spot and took the smallest bottle, just in case it’s another sweet formulation.
Fortunately for me, it was not sweet at all! In fact, my humble taste buds could not tell the difference between this and the imported brand I returned a few hours earlier!
[The only regret I had was not buying the biggest bottle so I wouldn’t have to wait for the next grocery schedule!]