From Oliver Baker comes the sad news that Scharffen Berger, a small Berkeley-based independent maker of very, very good chocolate has been consumed by Hershey’s, which is about as close as you can come to getting assimilated by the Borg in the world of chocolate.

There’s news of the acquisition on the Hershey’s website but the Scharffen Berger news page lacks any mention of it.

The purchase is ironic given that the Scharffen Berger factory tour, at least when we took it last year, contained a lot of Hershey’s-slagging — lots of talk about the low cacao content in the crap chocolate that Hershey’s turns out.

Why is this a bad thing? One quote sums it all up for me; in this story:

“We view it as a great opportunity,” said Stephanie Moritz, a spokeswoman for Hershey. “Scharffen Berger is very on trend.”