What's up with Hershey's and their allergy labeling?

[lmintzer]

Joshua has an egg and a nut allergy (peanuts and tree nuts). His allergist recommends that we avoid food that has been made on shared equipment with nut products. We are okay with it being made in the same facility. I know this differs from child to child, but this seems to be okay for him.

I could have sworn that we once bought a bag of Hershey's kisses that were labeled "made in a facility that processes nut." He at them and was fine. Today, I was looking at packages of Kisses and can't find any allergy information at all. I purposefully checked a pack of peanut butter kisses, thinking those would have a label for sure, but nothing.

What gives here? Did they change their labeling/packaging? I want to buy a pack of plain ones but feel like I can't because they say nothing. Their website is most unhelpful, and it's too late to reach them by phone.

[alien_host]

My DD has a nut and egg allergy. I'm pretty sure the Hersey peanut butter kisses would list PEANUT as one of the ingredients, if they do they don't have to give any other warnings since peanut is listed prominently.

We've use the Plain kisses without incident and the "regular sized" plain hershey bars (for example the Larger sized bars - King maybe, had a warning. I've never seen a warning on the Plain kisses.

The "halloween fun sized" ones candy bars do tend to have a "Made in a facility the processes Peanuts" etc. as do the regular sized KitKats for example.

I've been comfortable with Hershey's labeling because different sizes of the same candy are labeled differently which leads me to believe that they do track how the candy is made and label appropriately.

[lablover]

Unless something changed very recently, Hershey's has always stated that if there is any chance of an allergen being in the product it will be stated on the bag. Some items will be safe and some won't, so you always have to go by the label on the particular item that you have. So if the bag doesn't have an allergy warning statement it should be safe. On the peanut butter kisses I'm assuming it labeled peanut as an ingredient?

Just FYI - there was a study done awhile back and in actuality, the "made in a facility" had the highest occurence of contamination, more than "made on the same equipment". I don't have the link but I can probably find it. When you are eating something with a warning on it, you are basically taking a chance on whether it's contaminated or not. You may eat a product one time and be fine, but the next time you may be unlucky and get a contaminated product and react to it. You may already know that but just wanted to write it out as I think that is the most misunderstood thing about the warnings. People think that just because they are fine one time eating a product with a warning label on it that they will always be fine. The odds are with you (the chance of cross-contamination was about 17% in the study I saw) but there is risk there.