On Facebook, Hershey responded to individual complaints from bakers in several states, saying that the company was looking into it. On Wednesday, Hershey used the broken tips to deliver a message about diversity. The social media post showed Kisses of different varieties alongside ones with missing tips: “Warm hearts this holiday season and take the time to celebrate our differences,” it said.

This did not satisfy the buyers of the tipless Kisses.

“American bakers want to have REAL answers: What happened, why it happened, what *exactly* they are going to do about it, and when we may expect a resolution to the problem,” Tamsen DiBlasio, a home baker in Baltimore, wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.

She was making peanut butter blossoms this month for a holiday gathering when she noticed all of the tips of the Hershey’s Kisses were gone — the remnants nowhere to be found.

“What in the world?” she recalled thinking.

In an interview on Saturday, Ms. DiBlasio said she and other bakers would like an apology “for being sold defective products at top dollar.”

Hershey receives about 8,000 customer inquiries each month, and in December approximately 2 percent were about the broken tips, Mr. Beckman said on Saturday.

Only solid chocolate Kisses were affected, not the filled kisses, which are made by a different production process, he said. All of the solid Kisses distributed in the United States are made in Hershey, Pa., he added.

Hershey’s Kisses were introduced in the early 1900s and have become synonymous with its billion-dollar brand. By 2014 an image of a Kiss had been incorporated into the company’s logo.