What Did You Do To My Feast?!

When brands forget about what drives consumer loyalty

There’s a specific kind of irritation reserved for the moment you bite into a childhood-favourite treat and realise it has changed. It feels like a betrayal. And if you live in the UK, you might be feeling betrayed this summer by Wall’s Feast ice cream.

The old Feast was a biscuity chocolate coating over chocolate ice cream with a solid block of chocolate in the centre. It was one of the first things I picked up when I moved back to the UK after having been in the US for over a decade. It was that good. Now, in 2026, the chocolate ice cream has been swapped for vanilla, the biscuit pieces in the exterior for hazelnuts, and (the most egregious of all) the solid chocolate core for some kind of Nutella-like mush.

Wall’s has described this as an “improved” recipe that’s apparently supposed to “excite shoppers.”

Shoppers, however, are not excited.

I thankfully found out about this disastrous change through multiple social media videos about it, instead of biting into an ersatz Feast bar myself. Here’s a selection of representative comments under Wall’s own ad promoting the new recipe:

Had these a few days ago and will never buy again.

YOU RUINED MY FAVORITE THING!

It’s rotten bring the original one back PLEASE

It’s okay I’ll just get the Aldi dupe instead

u destroyed them

Whoever decided this was a good idea is dumb af

It’s downright offensive change it back

This is absolutely disgusting. Make it chocolate again or I’ll never buy it again. At least make this just a variant.

I was going to do a sentiment analysis of comments across platforms, but I found it quite challenging to locate a single positive comment, so I decided not to waste my time and call it at least 90% negative (an estimate, I must add; I’m not making up data here. It might actually be 99.9%).

Why do I care enough about this to write about it?

Partially because I want this back…

The ice cream formerly known as Feast

… but primarily because of what it tells us about the psychology of brand loyalty and the critical errors companies make when they alter beloved products. This is a PR crisis for Wall’s that many other brands have faced. Let’s have a look at the response strategies that set the brands that survive backlash apart from those that don’t.

“Improved” Recipe My A**

Changing a legacy product is renegotiating a contract with your most loyal advocates. If you do it quietly, dismiss their complaints, or tell them the new version is better when their taste buds tell them otherwise, you break that contract. The brands that survive these crises are the ones that remember who really ‘owns’ the brand: the person standing in the freezer aisle, looking for the chocolate ice cream they remember from childhood. Like the commenter I quoted above who’s planning to buy the Aldi knockoff of the old Feast shows, your consumers will go to other brands that offer what they’re looking for if yours no longer aligns.

These product changes are almost always framed as an ‘improvement’ or ‘evolution’ (or, perhaps if their marketing team has gone too deep into the AI, ‘elevated’ or ‘unlocked potential’). It does make sense from a corporate perspective to frame it this way, as you don’t really want to outright announce that you’re doing something like, perhaps, cutting costs by swapping expensive cocoa butter for cheaper alternatives.

But from a psychological perspective, calling a beloved product ‘improved’ while you’re fundamentally changing it is a massive comms misstep. Why?

Look at how consumers relate to the brands they love.

In 1988, consumer researcher Russell Belk introduced the concept of the extended self, arguing that the things we buy aren’t just external objects but instead become integrated into our identity. We use them to signal who we are, to connect with our past, and to anchor our sense of self. So, when a brand like Wall’s or Cadbury or Hershey’s has been part of your life since childhood, there’s emotional and identity-related attachment involved. It’s tied to memories and those simpler times we all want to go back to sometimes (and senses like taste and smell are great ways to temporarily achieve that time-travel). This is the power of brand nostalgia. Consumers who feel nostalgic toward a product show strong negative reactions when that product is changed.

Altering a nostalgic product messes with your consumers’ memories, and there’s no amount of ‘improvement’ that will make someone who eats something because it reminds them of their childhood think it’s better when it no longer tastes like the past. Brands that do this are failing to understand that brand loyalty is based in emotional investment and connection with the product.

The #1 Rollout Mistake

The first mistake brands make is trying to slip the change past the consumer, knowing it will be unpopular. They might change the packaging slightly, or keep it identical and hope nobody reads the ingredients. This is somewhat what is happening with Feast. Wall’s did announce the change in January, but it wasn’t until the weather became warm enough for people to want ice cream that they really noticed. Most found out when they took a bite and found that it “tastes like ass” (direct quote from a TikTok comments section, apologies…).

This ‘element of surprise’ is disastrous because the consumer’s first feeling is betrayal; “I have been tricked”. That’s much more of an intense reaction than, “I don’t like this new recipe”.

The brand has broken the implicit trust that the product inside the wrapper matches the product the consumer has known for years.

And when someone feels betrayed by a brand, they will post about it, and they will share their disappointment. That emotion is contagious and validates the feelings of thousands of other consumers who had the same experience but hadn’t yet articulated them. It also means that a negative review of the new version of the product could be the first thing a consumer hears about it; even if they might have actually liked the new version, they’ll be tasting it with the negativity in mind or maybe not even trying it, believing that they won’t like it without needing to taste-test it to check.

When it’s a product that many people have an emotional attachment to, like a favourite childhood treat, the viral potential of negative reviews is high, and once that happens, the narrative is out of the brand’s control. The individuals making the viral videos become the authority on how the new formula is perceived, and the narrative becomes that the brand has ruined something consumers loved. Once the narrative control is lost, the risk of reaching the tipping point into a full-blown crisis is high. The backlash will either fizzle out, or it will move beyond social media into the mainstream press and begin to tangibly impact sales. The brand’s response has a substantial impact on the outcome. In almost every case of product reformulations going spectacularly wrong, the crisis has been exacerbated by how the brand communicates the change.

If a change is necessary, brands must communicate it openly before the product hits the shelves; explain the why without resorting to corporate spin. Consumers are more forgiving of economic realities than they are of feeling like they’ve been tricked. If cocoa prices have skyrocketed, say so.

The Biggest Comms Mistake: Dismissing The Consumer

The response to backlash is the make-or-break moment for the brand. The initial response is often defensive or dismissive; the brand points to the business logic (cocoa prices are up, supply chains are disrupted, consumer tastes are evolving. etc.) and uses that as justification, or they downplay the effects of the product change on the consumer, essentially communicating that consumer’s loyalty and nostalgia are irrelevant.

Hershey’s, for example, replaced real milk chocolate with compound coatings in several Reese’s line extensions earlier this year. Brad Reese, the grandson of the peanut butter cup’s inventor, posted a viral open letter on LinkedIn criticizing the recipe changes and described the new product as “not edible” to The Associated Press. The company’s CFO, on an earnings call, stated that the formula changes had “no consumer impact whatsoever”.

This is another cardinal sin of crisis communications: telling the consumer that their experience isn’t real.

The outrage forced Hershey into a public reversal, promising to return all products to classic milk and dark chocolate recipes by 2027.

But the damage to trust may already be done. The phrase “no consumer impact whatsoever” reveals a corporate mindset that sees consumers as data points rather than stakeholders.

When brands dismiss consumer concerns, they trigger a psychological phenomenon known as reactance. When people feel their freedom of choice or their emotional reality is being threatened, they push back harder. A dismissive or defensive response makes the backlash no longer about the product but the brand’s attitude toward its stakeholders, and assuming they’ll accept whatever is put in front of them out of prior brand loyalty is an expensive mistake because it takes years to rebuild broken trust. Consumers who feel betrayed often boycott the brand entirely and become active detractors.

An Effective Response

A quick reversal is the only truly effective crisis response in situations like this when the backlash is severe. The gold standard for this remains the New Coke debacle of 1985, when Coca-Cola changed its 99-year-old formula. The brand’s response, bringing back the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic, is what saved them. Coca-Cola executives neither defended the new formula nor dismissed the anger. They held a press conference and admitted they had “underestimated the passion and sense of patriotism for the brand”. This level of humility is rare but incredibly effective in corporate communications. It validates the consumer’s ownership of the brand and says, “You were right, we were wrong, and we are listening.”

Similarly, when Tropicana changed its packaging in 2009 (with a ~$30 million investment in the redesign), it lost ~$30 million in sales in just two months, and it didn’t wait for the market to adjust. The change was reversed within weeks, and the company acknowledged that the new design had alienated their core buyers. The speed of the reversal mitigated the long-term damage.

Acknowledging that the original was loved and validating the nostalgia is a great approach for reconnecting with consumers. When Walkers brought back discontinued Worcester Sauce crisps in 2025, they leaned in to their consumer’s emotional connection and built campaigns around the nostalgia, acknowledging that people had missed them.

Is it possible to change a beloved product without triggering a backlash?

Yes.

But it needs to be done in consideration of the relationship with consumers. Instead of imposing a change from the top down, brands can involve consumers in the process. If a recipe needs to change due to ingredient costs, the brand can be transparent about the challenge and ask for input.

Imagine if Wall’s had announced: “Cocoa prices have made the solid chocolate core of the Feast unsustainable. We have three potential new recipes. We want YOU to help us choose the future of the Feast.”

It might not have resulted in the old Feast consumers want, but this collaborative approach at least helps consumers feel involved and reduces that ‘element of surprise’ that results from the sneaky change or poor consumer-facing communication.

Another effective strategy is to introduce the new version as a limited edition or a variant, rather than a replacement, so it can be tested without alienating the core demographic. If the new version is genuinely better, consumers will gravitate towards it organically, and the old version can be phased out with less backlash; if the new version isn’t popular, it can be withdrawn without damaging the legacy product. Wall’s tried this by bringing out a new variant with the Feast Caramel, but they undermined the strategy by simultaneously altering the original Feast. If they had left the original intact and introduced the caramel variant as an alternative, they might have avoided the backlash entirely.

Wall’s may still be able to fix this. Bring back the original Feast, keep the new recipe as a variant if there’s really demand for it, and acknowledge that consumers were really complaining about losing a tiny, edible piece of their past.

This is the lesson for any brand tempted to “improve” a legacy product: you are not changing a recipe but a memory and emotional attachment. So, before you take the chocolate core out of someone’s childhood… ask them first.

Sources

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/209154

Shields, A. B., & Johnson, J. W. (2016). What did you do to my brand? The moderating effect of brand nostalgia on consumer responses to changes in a brand. Psychology & Marketing, 33(9), 713–728. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.20912

Lempert, P. (2026). Why Hershey's Is Facing A PR Crisis. Forbes.

Clee, Mona A., and Robert A. Wicklund. “Consumer Behavior and Psychological Reactance.” Journal of Consumer Research 6, no. 4 (1980): 389–405. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2488740.

Andrivet, M. (2025, February 10). New Coke: A classic branding case study on a major product change failure. The Branding Journal. https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2025/02/new-coke/