Food blogging during the Halloween season can often bring you to strange, sometimes harrowing avenues of the American retail cosmology. Obscure, almost shady, niche companies crawl out of the woodwork every September and start hurling a dizzying array of novelty candies and tchotchkes in a shotgun pattern at hungry children who, really, will make you buy just about anything.

Bloomsberry & Co., however, really take this thing to a whole new level. Before encountering Genuine Midnight Oil Broomstick Fuel, I was entirely unaware of their existence. However – and I know this will surprise you, too – there apparently exists a company who’s sole purpose is to repackage two types of chocolate bar and resell them in an entirely unnecessary variety of nonsensical, sometimes bewildering assortment of labels. That’s it. Milk chocolate and dark chocolate. In literally dozens of presentations.

Upon first spying the bars at a local Target, the Junk Food Betty Product Acquisition Task Force originally believed the product to be in a dilapidated state – a sign of dubious quality and subsequent high hilarity. Closer examination, however, revealed the weather look of the product to be an intentional conceit of the design. Why, we asked ourselves. Who deliberately makes their product look like it could be found on the dusty back shelves of some degenerate bodega, moldering forlornly under the uncaring watch of a lazy, apathetic staff? Who would conceive of such a baffling, non sequitur product presentation?

And it occurred to me: hipsters. Hipsters pull this shit.

This is a candy company run by tragically bored goddamned graphic designers.

This all being the case, I didn’t have high hopes. To compound the problem, the product claims to be dark chocolate with 55% cocoa. Now, I’m not a big chocolate guy. However, when I do reach for it, I’m one of those smug bastards who goes for the hardest, darkest stuff he can find. The kind who eats the 80% cocoa bars that give you Whiskey Face and then goes on a delighted tirade about the interplay of the sweet and the bitter until you’re ready to stomp him into the dirt. I am That Guy, and this hipster chocolate bar be frontin’ on the dark chocolate.

In all fairness, the product is of pretty decent quality. It’s got a smooth consistency, without being soft and mushy, and they don’t fool around with their ingredients. Their milk chocolate is probably pretty good. But if this bar is 55% cocoa liquor, I’ll eat my acrid, chocolate hat. In fact, looking at the ingredients list, sugar is listed before chocolate, making that an impossibility, as here in the US, ingredients are listed in order of amount contained. That’s definitely reflected in the flavor, which is too much sweet, too little bitter for dark chocolate.

I’d like to dispute the claim on the front of the package that Genuine Midnight Oil Broomstick Fuel that reads “suits all makes and models”. I know they’re trying to wring blood out of that incomprehensible witch… thing, I don’t even know. Look, this is a stupid gimmick and a stupid dark chocolate bar and I hate it and I hate you. Call me when your palate grows up, Bloomsberry & Co.

• Score: 2 out of 5 unparseable gimmicks
• Price: $1.99
• Size: 3.5 oz. bar
• Purchased at: Target
• Nutritional Quirks: Lies, damned lies, and ingredient lists.