Recently was in Peachtree Georgia and go to walmart for some shopping, of course i see swedish fish, my favorite candy, get some and notice they are hard and not that great. Ingredients have aspartame in it. Stuff I like to avoid, but i ain't no food waster.
Come back to my home state and look at swedish fish here, but they don't have aspartame. Interesting, are they poisoning different states with chemicals.
Food corporations like to roll out a relatively normal product at first, with normal ingredients, and when people began to buy it silently replace normal ingredients with chemistry.
Also such things happens when manufacturer tries to keep the same price in times of inflation. Replacing pork and beef in sausages to chicken, shugar with sweeteners, natural juice with artificial flavorings and so on.
If manufacturer is old and had stable quality for years, it is a second case - hiding inflation. There still stocks of normal product in your grocery, but already new batch in town you visited.
If you like that candies, fill your stocks with candies from your town, because very soon they will be replaced with new batches with aspartam.