I'd believe that the 90s on food industry was way worse than now in some ways, almost no control I suppose, already at least a decade of creating shareholders values etc.

They don't have to be perfectly innocent - it's still a big win if they were way more innocent, which they were. All kinds of products, from food to clothes, had better ingredients and fewer cheap substitutes.

That song is from 2000 though.

You're thinking of it from the wrong perspective. Lots of formulas were changed so that ingredients were substituted with cheaper alternatives. There's an artificial chocolate that uses no cocoa used by lots of items claiming to be chocolate. Just because people are more aware of it does not mean the companies are not using the cheaper formula. One of these stories was recently in the news about Reese's peanut butter cups[0]. So it seems to be one of the rare times evilCorp relented under public pressure instead of stock price pressure

[0]https://apnews.com/article/hershey-reeses-chocolate-peanut-b...

In the 90s it was more common to find aspartame and artificial colors in candy (although those haven't disappeared), but less common to find polyglycerol polyricinoleate and similar emulsifiers in chocolate.

In the UK, it was 1984. Regulations were further expanded in 2021.

‘artificial flavour’ may be doing some heavy lifting

The reason is that back then while Mars bars were more unhealthy - everything else was more healthy.

Eg. Mayonnaise contained eggs and oil instead of the weird crap + sugar mayonnaise is made of now.

Also even things like the vegetables has more minerals in and the chicken had less fat in it.