Costly delight

Nestlé, which owns the name "Toll House" (after the inn where the chocolate-chip cookie originated more than 75 years ago), makes chips (which it calls "morsels") in several flavors besides the original semisweet chocolate. These come in 10- or 11-ounce bags instead of the 12-ounce bag of the original morsels, but (of course) sell for the same price. New Toll House pumpkin-spice morsels, for example, come in an 11-ounce bag but sell for the same price as the 12-ounce bag of semisweet morsels, a 9 percent premium; no surprise.

But Nestlé just introduced DelightFulls: four flavors of "filled baking morsels" — chocolate chips with a different flavor inside: dark chocolate with mint- or cherry-flavored filling, and milk chocolate with caramel or peanut butter filling.

It might be more difficult (and possibly more expensive) to produce a chocolate morsel with mint or peanut butter flavor and color in the middle, instead of simply adding a bit of mint or peanut butter flavor to a chocolate morsel. That said, these new morsels come in bags weighing only 9 ounces, and at the store where he found them — where 12-ounce bags of regular Toll House morsels sell for $2.69, or 22 cents an ounce — the DelightFulls sell for $3.79, or 42 cents an ounce. That's a whopping 90 percent more per ounce!

Costly freeze

Mr. Tidbit finds a second new Nestlé Toll House product, four varieties of frozen cookie dough, more difficult to comprehend.

Nestlé already makes a number of Toll House refrigerated chocolate-chip cookie doughs. These include a 16 ½-ounce roll of slice-and-bake dough, and more than a dozen varieties of cookie dough in 16- and 16 ½-ounce break-and-bake packages of cookie-dough chunks.

At the same store where he found the DelightFulls, Mr. Tidbit noted that the roll and all the break-and-bake doughs were $2.54 — 15 cents an ounce. The 18-ounce bags of the new frozen cookies, containing 18 1-ounce cookies, sell at that store for $4.99. That's 28 cents an ounce, 87 percent more per ounce than the roll or chunks.

The new dough is labeled "Freezer to oven!" The others could be labeled "Refrigerator to oven!" Mr. Tidbit can't see the difference.

Al Sicherman