Golden. Delicious. Kit Kat (1937) celebrates 50 years as a four-fingered favourite.

KIT KAT

Launched around the same time as the Aero, the Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp made much less of a splash. It was just as innovative as its porous counterpart, a chocolate-encased double wafer of the like never seen before. ‘The biggest little meal in London’ was its original selling point, equating those two snappable fingers to a two-course meal (of, presumably, pudding and pudding). In 1937 it became the Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp, and shortly after the war those last two words were finally dropped. The Kit Kat had arrived.

Problem was, it had arrived pretty much unnoticed. Its humble ambitions – ‘the perfect companion to a cup of tea’ went the early slogan – hardly marked it out for greatness. Thank heavens, then, for advertising giants J. Walter Thompson, who hatched the ‘Have a break’ slogan in 1939 and stayed with the bar, and those words, for the rest of the century. Never have three words proved so durable, whether accompanied by Bernard Cribbins as a chatty fisherman, Arthur English as a security guard, or a hapless New Romantic outfit destined to go ‘a long way’. In the first half of the ’70s, sales rose by over two-thirds on the back of such economical publicity, and seldom faltered afterwards.

Kit Kat statistics make for giddy reading. By 1984, Rowntree were shifting 24 million bars a week. In 1987, forty were said to be eaten every second worldwide. Even so, it never got higher than number two, always the bridesmaid to Mars’s bride. Then came Euro expansion: travel to France or Italy in the ’80s and you could amaze your school chums by returning with, respectively, five- and three-fingered mutant Kit Kats.

The rise wasn’t inexorable: March 1985 saw the GLC react to Rowntree’s lack of transparency regarding disclosure of equal employment opportunities by summarily banning Kit Kats from school tuck shops in the Greater London area. Well intentioned perhaps, but you don’t play politics with the kids’ lunch, Mr Livingstone. Mrs Thatcher, herself no stranger to snatching dairy produce from the mouths of babes, dissolved the GLC the following year, like a Kit Kat finger in a hot cuppa, just in time for the bar’s golden jubilee.

Eats, shoots and leaves – that Who Dares Wins-indebted panda ad, circa 1989.