What were they thinking? Take a hedgehog, remove its spines, dessicate it, add chocolate flavour, and roll it into a Cadbury Picnic. It doesn’t sound promising: Cadbury Picnic Hedgehog.

Come to think of it, we don’t even have hedgehogs in Australia! Your average teenage chocolate-bar-buyer probably doesn’t even, like, know what a hedgehog is. The bar should perhaps have been called a Picnic Echidna for the local market. I’ll check the ingredients list to see if it’s only made from local ingredients. Hmm, can’t tell. Perhaps there’s an illicit trade in dessicated hedgehog. AQIS should be told!

My local Coles supermarket was clearing the shelves of ‘New’ Cadbury Picnic Hedgehogs. Special! Clearance! Within the best before date. How could I resist?

A unique combination of peanuts, chocolate fudge, biscuit pieces, caramel and wafer in delicious Cadbury milk chocolate.

Deep down I knew there were no mammals involved. Hedgehogs just don’t work in confectionery. The manufacturer, Cadbury, was apparently thinking of that Australian slice-staple Hedgehog, mostly made of crushed biscuits, chocolate, butter, sugar and nuts.

The Cadbury Picnic Hedgehog (formerly known as ‘New’, now ‘Clearance’) bore no resemblance to Hedgehog. Really. To say someone was even thinking of Hedgehog when they developed this product would be stretching things. Take one Picnic bar, remove the rice crispy bits, add biscuit nuggets and pieces of so-called fudge. Bite into it.

Stop!

Those fudge pieces are quite firm. Firm enough to make you think the chocolate bar contains foreign bodies (think: contamination scare). Was I about to break a tooth on a stone?

The very firm little ‘fudge’ pieces were thin and rectangular and tasted just a bit of chocolate. A textural disaster. The nuggets of biscuit were flavourless and powdery. This Picnic was on a downer.

I love the idea of product development. All that balancing of flavours and textures, shapes and nuances, sounds like heaps of fun. Companies tend to be quite secretive about these things and employ experienced professionals to devise new products. So what happened here? Experts’ day off at Cadbury? An executive whim imposed on the consuming public? I’m writing to Cadbury as you read.

– DM