Chocolate Covered Pretzels.

I am about to publicize a personal mystery of mine that has been prominent in my life for over two years. It began with a gift that my girlfriend had gotten for Christmas from a friend. It tasted delicious, but something strange caught my eye. Here's the picture I took of it:

Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Let me write down what the name of that fickle pretzel rod is: Milk Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Pretzel Rods. Think about that for a second. They are saying that they are selling you a chocolate covered peanut butter, pretzel rod. Now that is odd, but it could just be a design fluke. Or maybe it allows them to put the emphasis on the Peanut Butter aspect of this tasty treat.

A few weeks pass and I'm at the grocery store and see a bucket of the delectable sweet and salty snacks. This time it's made by Herr's:

That's right, Herr's Milk Chocolate Flavored Sourdough Coated Pretzels. Do I need to repeat that again? Milk Chocolate Flavored, Sourdough, Coated Pretzels. What the hell does that mean? Any way you chose to clump those words together, it makes zero sense. Milk chocolate flavored Sourdough? That's an interesting choice. Sourdough coated pretzels? I'm pretty sure that's not even physically possible. 

By this point I was starting to actively search for other chocolate covered pretzels. Then, I came across Snyder's version:

That's cool that Hershey's teamed up with them, but clearly they were unable to prevent Snyder's from making the same weird faux pas as other pretzel brands are making. "Pretzel Dips Dipped in Hershey's White Crème". Two things stick out: They are calling mini pretzels, Pretzel Dips, and the fact that there is no mention of the word chocolate to be found. It's not as if we all casually refer to Hershey's white chocolate bars as "White Crème Bars". 

This was the moment I started to believe that there's something going on in the pretzel world that everyone around me is oblivious to. I took to social media to ask around if anyone else has noticed this strange quirk, but no one answered me. Weeks later I slowly began getting snapchats and Instagram DM's from people I haven't talked to in years. The theme was common... pictures they have taken of various chocolate covered pretzels with weird labels calling them even weirder things.

I'm going to save some time here and just attach a bunch more of the brands for you to see that I'm not lying.

My personal favorite from these bunch are Utz's "Chocolate Flavored Specials Bite Size Pretzels". It makes my head hurt when I try to figure out how they meant for that to be read. How could such large brands just allow for such messy items to be sold under their names?

I believed it had to do with a trademark/patent/copyright. It would make sense right? Some large greedy brand bought the rights to the words "Chocolate Covered/Coated Pretzels", and now everyone else is trying to avoid being sued out of all their money. The problem with this theory is the fact that there are multiple pretzel companies that use those exact words. Here are a few of em:

To be honest, I have no idea why brands are doing this. What really confuses me is that Herr's has one chocolate coated pretzel titled just that, while another one of their items are confusing and avoiding those buzzwords. Your guess is as good as mine.