INTRODUCTION

Modern chocolate has a truly global heritage. The ancient Mayans were the first to tap into its unique charms. They harvested cocoa beans as currency, bartered them with the Aztecs for jewellery and - who knows? - probably ripped off their own grannies down the Yucatan branch of Cash4Cocoa. More importantly, they also roasted it for a spicy, astringent drink called xocolatl, but the secret was soon stolen. The victorious Spanish conquistadors left Mexico with galleons-full, which made them very popular back home. Europe’s well-to-do queued up for their morning draft of ‘good hot jocolatte’, adding milk, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar - anything to embellish the rich, unctuous taste. It wasn’t until the development of the cocoa press (by Dutchman Casparus Van Houten - no relation to Denise), which separated the fatty cocoa butter from the dark chocolate powder, that anyone thought to start moulding it into solids.

Confectionery, not necessity, was the mother of invention. Technological breakthroughs followed accordingly: Menier’s chocolate factory (1829); Nestlé’s milk powder formula (1867); Sechaud’s chocolate-filling machine (1913). Each brought affordable, tangible chocolate morsels closer to the (cocoa) masses. Never mind 1066 and all that: as industry laureate elect Roald Dahl zealously declared, ‘These dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the memory of every child.’ Knowing old Roald, he probably meant that literally. Still, it’s no less gruesome a fate than drowning in a river of chocolate, Augustus Gloop-style.

Factories and familiar names sprang up across Britain – Fry, Cadbury, Rowntree – in the most part run by teetotal, pacifist men of faith who believed in the beneficial properties of their product. Little by little, chocolate revealed its versatility: as a gift for a loved one; a reward for an obedient child; or an amuse-bouche at the ambassador’s receptions. Our appetite for the brown stuff continued to develop down the years, particularly around Christmas time. Even after roast turkey with all the trimmings, there always seemed to be room for a little segment of Terry’s tap-it-and-unwrap-it Chocolate Orange.

The passing of time has brought with it more heinous crimes and unearthed the sinful side of the cocoa bean. In recent years, chocolate has been used and abused, whether as a shower-clogging syrup substitute for blood in Hitchcock’s Psycho, or a saucy, valance-staining body paint for bawdy bedroom shenanigans. And what is the point of those edible toolkits? They’re about as much use as a chocolate chastity belt. (Although the spanner might be quite handy for wrenching one open.)

Elvis Presley loved it. Saddam Hussein lived on it. From fountains and fondues to Scottish deep-fat fryers, chocolate gets everywhere. Especially over kids’ faces. Before you know it, we’ll be using it as currency. Chocolate coins, eh? Whatever next?

Badge manners? Rolo (1937), Aztec (1967) and Curly Wurly (1970) lapel decoration opportunities for chocoholic kids.

ONE CHUNK LEADS TO ANOTHER

The first solid block of edible chocolate appeared in this country in 1847, courtesy the Fry brothers of Bristol. Although ‘edible’ in this case is a loose definition: even by the standards of today’s pure cocoa brands, this one was a bitter tooth-breaker. It was only after Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter unveiled the Gala Peter in 1886, the first soft milk chocolate bar, that bars of chocolate looked like they might be a good sister product for the already popular drinking variety.

There were scores of technical problems to overcome first, mainly to do with milk’s tendency to go off at the drop of a hat. By 1902 Fry’s had perfected their weirdly named Five Boys, and Rowntree punted out an Alpine Milk bar. This name was a bit of a giveaway that, as far as the public was concerned, in chocolate terms it was Swiss or nothing, a state of affairs underlined two years later when Nestlé imported the esteemed Kohler and Cailler recipe to their UK factory.

In the end, slow and steady George Cadbury won the race. Eight years in development, his Highland Milk bar tasted good enough to beat the Swiss. It was renamed Dairy Maid, and shortly after renamed again to Dairy Milk, on the advice of a Plymouth shopkeeper. Boasting ‘1½ glasses in every ½lb’, it was launched in 1905 to great success. A year later, the plain Bournville appeared, followed by Fruit and Nut in 1928, Whole Nut two years after that, and a slew of tasty fillings from Caramello to the raisin and biscuit Tiffin from 1934 onwards. It wasn’t Cadbury’s game entirely – Nestlé added Rice Krispies to make their Dairy Crunch in 1938 – but a reputation was being forged. Even Hitler couldn’t stop its advance: one press ad in the bleak days of 1939 advised: ‘The habit of taking a block of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk per day has been medically recommended as a sensible personal precaution for this autumn and winter.’ If, of course, you could get hold of any.

Class and a half. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk (1905), Sultana (1982), Whole Nut (1933) and Fruit & Nut (1928) offer scoffable sharing for all.

After the war, diversification was the thing. Dairy Milk blocks added filling upon filling. By 1960, the usual suspects lined up alongside pineapple, peppermint, coffee, marzipan, strawberry and the intriguingly vague ‘mild dessert’. A modern marketing man would express concern about ‘dilution of the core product’, and rightly, as this was the year of an unwelcome intruder. Already the leader in filled bars by a mile, Mars moved into chocolate blocks that autumn with Galaxy: quality chocolate in bigger sizes than Cadbury’s, plugged with a massive ad campaign. Designed as a pre-emptive attack based on rumours Cadbury were working on a Mars bar rival, it did more damage to Cadbury than their Aztec would do to Mars’s crown.

Cadbury fought back by dropping their prices and defending the brand with some rearguard campaigning. The late 1960s was full of entreaties for Britons to ‘award yourself the CDM’. A nice idea, but a bit staid for such a forward-looking time, and in the early ‘70s it became more wistful still, asking punters if, in this modern, synthetic, concrete world, wasn’t it good to know that ‘there’s always Cadbury’s Dairy Milk’? Then in 1976 Rowntree launched their Yorkie, and such statements suddenly looked very optimistic. Hit even harder, Cadbury returned to the ‘glass and a half’ tagline they’d abandoned in the mid-’60s, and fought the lorry drivers of York with Cilla Black putting a chunk in her cheek on the top deck of a Blackpool tram. Meanwhile Frank Muir twisted his tongue round tales of bucolic Fruit and Nut mania to the strains of Tchaikovsky, and a scarily omnipotent calypso band informed unwitting citizens of the world that, regarding nuts (whole hazelnuts), Cadbury take them and they cover them in chocolate. To seal this fightback, the bars themselves also became thicker (and pricier) once more.

Chock-A-Block. Astronomer’s favourite, Mars Galaxy (1960) and the less-than-stellar Cadbury’s Big One (1971).

The ever-changing sizes were in part due to the rocketing price of cocoa, which increased tenfold between 1973 and 1977. It made sense to shift the focus away from the actual chocolate, of which there was inevitably going to be a lot less, and onto the exotic innards. And innards didn’t come more exotic than 1970s innards, with Cadbury leading the way. Things started off simply with the self-explanatory Oranges and Lemons (‘a happy new taste in filled blocks!’). Chips of various types were added: Crunchie pieces in Golden Crisp, mint shards in the well-loved Ice Breaker. A spate of Wild West branding came along (as it did to most snack foods at the time, for some reason). The gingham-clad raisin and biscuit slab Country Style was promoted with a sharpshooting variation on Spot the Ball, and Gold Mine – a Golden Crisp but with slightly smaller Crunchie chunks – carried on the frontier theme. They got more geographically adventurous with the Cadbury Classic range, featuring the tangy Ginger bar, the orange- and curaçao-steeped Grand Seville, and the papaya-stuffed Tropical Fruit. The other houses followed suit. In all, over forty-four new chocolate bars were introduced during the decade. Thirty were swiftly withdrawn, but that’s still not a bad hit rate.

Short and sweet. Cadbury’s Ice Breaker, circa 1973, and Gold Mine (1975) shared a brittle heart and an all-too brief shelf life.

Terry’s upmarket range was called Royal Gold. Coffee, lime, Turkish delight and marzipan temptingly resided within the shiniest of wrappers. They even broke up a bar, wrapping each tablet individually, packaging the lot back together again in slab form and calling it, for reasons obscure, the Oliver Twist. Nestlé, meanwhile, artfully dodged controversy by producing the reliably posh Superfine and Coffee Cream, with an occasional luxury item flourish, such as the muesli-adorned Alpine bar. Rowntree, by comparison, kept oddly quiet – Yorkie aside – during this product deluge. They scored an early winner with Mint Cracknel, a bar whose intriguing spun sugar centre was made in roughly the same way as nylon thread – as indeed was the facial hair of its on-screen representative, Noel Edmonds.

Terry’s, employing neon-handwriting style logos to full effect in the futuristic ‘80s with Bitz (1983) and Dark circa 1982.

If diversity was the watchword in the 1970s, the following decade was all about consolidation. Cadbury rebuilt their own image behind Dairy Milk (which, from 1985, went king size, along with everything else). They reintroduced dormant varieties like roast almond and sultana, and added the odd new bar like ‘when milk and plain collide’ peculiarity Gambit, but the main draw was increasingly Cadbury themselves, embracing the ‘80s corporate brand mania like an old hand. Terry’s, meanwhile, embraced the decade’s other nascent trend, graphic design, to jazz up the wrappers of their crispy chip Bitz range. As with nearly all design of this vintage, what started off looking like something from a millionaire’s pleasure palace in the Caribbean soon acquired the air of a Dunstable nightclub’s ladies night flyer. More sure-footed was Logger, a standard segmented bar cunningly disguised as a tree, and advertised with a shameless Monty Python lumberjack sketch homage. Such visual depreciation was common by now, and everyone soon learned that strong, traditional lines suited them best. Combine this with a fashion for corporate takeovers within the industry, and the seemingly endless variety of the 1970s chocolate market seemed to thin out drastically after 1990. Rowntree were subsumed by Nestlé, Terry’s by Kraft. Cadbury circled their wagons ever tighter, badging everything under the Dairy Milk label, while Mars continued to parry them with Galaxy. The shelves that had once heaved with wrappers of all hues and designs now bore endless ranks of relentlessly focus-grouped purple and brown. No more would entire lines be rebranded on the whim of a shop girl from Plymouth. This made sound business sense, but some of the fun had been let out, children of the future denied the Dickensian pleasure of bursting into a sweet shop and asking for ‘an Oliver Twist, two Tiffins and a Big Wig, please!’.

Come up to the lab and see what’s in the slab. Cadbury’s Gambit (1967), Nestle’s Feast circa 1974, Dairy Crunch (1965), Hazel Nut circa 1975, and Fizz Bang (1980); Cadbury-Fry’s Tiffin (1967).

BRANDED FOR LIFE

Wonderful as chocolate is, there’s a limit to what you can do with a bar of it. Bung in a fruity filling here, sling some hazelnuts at it from over there, wrap it round a bit of frothy nougat... there are other options, but most of those risk a custodial sentence. As the big chocolate companies of the land expanded and consolidated, they found these tired old tricks, most of them dating from before the war, weren’t giving them the brand range their national status required. So, if you can’t jigger up the contents, why not play about with the shape? This had been going on since the start of the century, with the likes of Fry’s Five Boys, a weird little bar decorated with the gurning expressions of one Lindsay Poulton, supposedly to demonstrate the tortuous emotional states gone through by the average small boy awaiting his cocoa fix.

Everyone knows his name – Rupert, Rupert the bar (1971).

Such high-concept wrapper action had no place in the modern chocolate era, though. Three simple pack-festooning candidates ruled the shelves: wacky cartoon animals, famous folk from the cinema and telly, and famous wacky cartoon animals from the cinema and telly. In 1970 Nestlé launched the Winnie the Pooh chocolate bar: bog-standard milk chocolate, but with a variety of characters from Disney’s recent A.A. Milne revamp on the labels. The sheer cross-media crowd-pleasing of this sort of thing was too good to do just the once, so over the next couple of years they pulled the same trick with The Aristocats, Robin Hood and the ever-collectable Doctor Who. When the chocolate ran out, the endorsements didn’t. The Pink Panther bar, a slab of strawberry-flavoured... stuff decorated with everyone’s favourite slightly camp gentleman, scholar and acrobat, was the first and most memorable of these (even if some of those memories come with a slightly suspicious aftertaste). Others included a cream-flavour Star Trek bar (‘She cannae taste any blander, Cap’n!’) and various Tom and Jerry concoctions, including a banana variant.

Chasing the pink pound – Nestle’s Pink Panther (1972).

BBC children’s programmes, as a rule, weren’t up for this sort of treatment, though since many were produced by third parties who kept merchandising rights close to their chests, there wasn’t a lot the Beeb could do if, say, FilmFair decided to let Chocolat Tobler launch a range of bars named after (but, crucially, not flavoured with) The Herbs. And if they then went off to Nestlé and got them to make Paddington Bear and Wombles chocolate, well, there wasn’t much Chocolat Tobler could do about that, either. Canny do-it-yourself cartoon maker Bob Godfrey similarly played the percentages, licensing Roobarb chocolate to Cadbury and the later Noah and Nelly bar franchise to Nestlé. It was every furry stop-motion animal for himself. Oliver Postgate, needless to say, kept well away from this sort of thing.

TV hits! Doctor Who (1971/3), Mr Men circa 1977, and The Wombles circa 1976, sell out in the name of cocoa.

Of course, not all hot intellectual property owners are up for handing out merchandising rights to the first sweet maker who gets them on the blower. Whether Barker and Dobson, otherwise highly esteemed manufacturers of Everton mints and the like, ever got in touch with ABC Television in 1978 to enquire about the spin-off state of affairs of the top-rating Happy Days is unknown, but their Fonz Rock Bar was a masterclass in endorsement-free cashing in, with its ‘50s jukebox stylings and cunning lack of any identifiable Henry Winkler presence on the wrapper at all. If you wanted official endorsement, perhaps it was best to aim low, as Austro-Welsh confectioners Caxton’s did in 1972 when they rolled out their Doris Archer Fudge, with full consent from the fictional Radio 4 soap matriarch.

Feeding time at the zoo, with Nestle’s milk chocolate menagerie, Animal Bar (1963), and Fry’s Super Mousse (1970).

If all else failed, you could make up your own characters from scratch. The uber-cute critters that simpered from Nestlé’s mighty, ever-expanding zoological Animal Bar range were a palpable hit with no telly counterpart needed, and their white chocolate Polar Joe bear bar didn’t do too badly either. The same couldn’t perhaps be said quite so emphatically of Fry’s Super Mousse, where the marketing department took one look at the mousse-filled chocolate slab in their charge and thought, ‘Mousse? Moose!’ So was born the Bullwinkle-esque superhero star of the wrappers, hailed by Fry’s as a ‘mythological personality’ who was sure to capture the hearts and minds of the nation’s children overnight. He didn’t. Neither did the cartoon band on the wrappers of Needler’s Pop Chocs range: Slicer Orange, Miss Krispie and Big Drummer Cocoa bore no resemblance to any genuine band, even in 1974, and their pop chocs remained unpicked. And who can forget Trebor’s Konks and Robbers, a Keystone Kops-oriented attempt to flog orange chocolate with the likes of Inspector Clueless, Konstable Klod and Ratnose Fink? A great many people, clearly.

Film fare. More cartoonish cash-ins from Galaxy and the adventures of Noddy (1970), Nestle’s Larry the Lamb (1970), Cadbury’s Soccerbar (1973), Monster Bar (1973) and Roobarb (1974).

As a last resort, you could brighten up a young child’s day with some entertaining spiel on the back of the wrapper. Okay, ‘entertaining’ often meant a rather dreary retelling of a TV episode, as with Nestlé’s Larry the Lamb bars (‘Part 3: Larry is fishing when he sees the Mayor approaching on a small raft’). Cadbury’s Soccerbars featured tips on how to improve match fitness. ‘Stop eating this chocolate’ might have been a good one, but the writers gamely tried to link sportsmanship with Bournville brands (‘Did you know that star footballers play leapfrog, Freddo’s favourite sport?’). They really let their hair down for the descriptions of assorted unlikely critters on Monster Bars. (‘The Murky Murgswump is a nasty monster that lurks about in murky swamps. The damp gives him nasty pains so that when he bends down he goes “OOH-AAH-OUCH!”’) Perhaps The Wombles bar gambit was best: a short description of how the MacWomble can crush nuts with his bare paws, and a cheery exhortation to Keep Britain Tidy by chucking the wrapper in the nearest bin. Wait a minute, though: weren’t you supposed to be collecting them? Once again, Tobermory hadn’t quite thought it through.

35% cocoa solids, 65% Beatrix Potter. Cadbury’s Furry Friends promise further animal adventures, circa 1974.

BEHIND BARS

Jargon alert! Ask any chocolatier or confectionery insider (and who doesn’t know at least three?) and they will tell you: a substantial majority of their industry profits is generated by what are known as ‘countlines’, those smooth choc-covered treats, filled with nougat, caramel, ill-fated factory-floor rats and so on, designed to be eaten on the move.

The cash cow of Slough: Mars (1932)

This particular form of one-handed pleasure isn’t easy to sell. Before the days of commercial television, kids were too busy up chimneys and picking pockets to buy their own sweets. The advent of advertising allowed brand leaders and their highly paid agencies to come up with increasingly ingenious campaigns to remind us that countlines were reliable, dependable and enjoyable (as opposed to the commonplace, lacklustre and dreary reality).

So, when Mars brought their popular candy bar over from the US to London in 1932, deliberately changing the recipe to suit European tastes (more sugar, less malt, sweeter caramel and, at first – unbelievably – Cadbury’s chocolate), they were unwittingly helping a future slogan-writer (not Murray Walker, despite what you might read elsewhere) come over all expert practitioner: ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.’ While the tagline riffed nattily on the old apple/doctor-repellent adage (ousting the previous Bob Monkhouse-fronted ‘Stars love Mars’ campaign in 1959), TV screens could be filled with sumptuous close-ups of sugar, caramel and thick, thick chocolate slathering over a nougat slab, yet still reinforce the impression that the Mars bar was not only nutritious, but practically vital. Of course, any claims were medically difficult to prove. (The reasoning went: milk ‘to nourish you, while you relax’; sugar ‘to give you the energy to work’; and chocolate, more exuberantly, ‘to play’. Oh, and glucose – just sugar again, wearing a pharmacist’s lab coat – which could do the work of the other three standing on its head.)

The Mars slogan that first appeared in print in 1959.

If they weren’t insistently showing us bogus production processes (the interior of a Milky Way was apparently ‘whipped over 1,000 times’ by a hand-held Kenwood electric whisk, if a 1980 advert is to be believed), Mars UK were encouraging assorted tower-block-dwelling, new-town youth to extol the virtues of snacking ‘without ruining your appetite’. Absent parents were replaced by older brothers or sisters dishing out chocolate purchased on the basis that it wouldn’t fill them up (in which case, what’s the point?). Lovell’s of Wales also momentarily squeezed into the ‘between meals’ gap with the candidly named Milky Lunch, a crisped-rice revamp of their brazenly opportunist Milky Whip. However, when Milky Way’s annoyingly ear-worm-laden red/blue car race animations were revived for a twenty-first-century audience, the relevant lines had been jarringly replaced – not because of health lobbyist complaints, but because market research had indicated no one was eating regular meals any more.

The other M&Ms. Milky Way (1935) and Marathon (1968).

Marathon, on the other hand, was positioned firmly as a meal replacement: ‘packed with peanuts’, curbing and satisfying hunger pangs like a chocolate dominatrix. As if to emphasise the Olympic origins of the name, all Greek honey and heroism, 1970s ads featured various athletic, bright-eyed teens (and Keith Chegwin) marvelling at the sheer magnitude of it all, while the bar itself repeatedly disassembled into slices, as if to demonstrate the efficient regularity of the internal peanut distribution. As any child of the era will recall, this practice inspired parents likewise to carve up and share out a single bar among brothers and sisters, each of whom would fight tooth and claw to be allocated a chocolate-heavy end piece.

Cheggers plays pep. Keith’s over-excited ad for Marathon, circa 1976

Ever alert to consumer behaviour, Mars’s product developers speedily introduced the ‘fun-size’ bar. From 1972 onward, everyone could have their own end piece. Pound for pound, they were more expensive than their standard-sized counterparts but such is the marketeer’s sleight of hand. To allay mums’ housekeeping money fears, some friendly adverts demonstrated how much more a bagload weighed than a box of posh chocs. ‘Two bites big,’ they said. Big! Not small. The scales couldn’t lie.

Aside from the short-term profit boost, another side effect of the treat-sized revolution was an increased number and regularity of ‘consumption occasions’, making nonstop grazing start to feel more normal. Trade magazine The Grocer identified a trend for ‘ambient snacks’, i.e. ones you could eat without actually noticing. Rowntree issued ‘pillow packs’ – inflated, miniaturised bags – of Rolo, Aero and Lion. Meanwhile, Cadbury, who’d missed the first foray into mini-bar territory (lacking the manufacturing capability to produce smaller versions of their own products prior to 1986), fortunately had one veteran countline, and a corporately funded nursery rhyme, to fall back on.

After a ‘new, more buttery taste’ had failed to ignite interest in the early ‘70s, Cadbury set about reminding parents that their ‘finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat’, with a deliberately nostalgic, dust-laden advert. The school orchestra-style rendering of old regimental brass number ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, courtesy of former Manfred Mann singer Mike d’Abo, alongside sentimental scenes of grey-shorts-and-jumpered boys playing conkers, was calculated to set apron-strings a-tightening and purse-strings a-loosening. Use of what a director of photography might call ‘a limited palette’, to belie the product’s true vintage, helped Cadbury smash any upstart competition, such as Meltis’s Fudge Finger.

What we’re all looking for in our chocolate is neatness, right? Fudge (1948), Topic (1962).

When the long, hot summer of ‘76 decimated chocolate sales (as everyone raided their newsagents for ice creams, especially the all-new Cornetto), the Fudge similarly became a poster-boy for Cadbury’s ‘straight from the fridge’ campaign, poking out of a glacier the following year, ‘firm, cool and icily irresistible’. Even then, Mars beat them to the punch with a set of ‘Cool ‘em for a summer’s day’ ads featuring Topic (another bar keen to reassure us of its evenly distributed innards: ‘a hazelnut in every bite’) and Bounty among the usual suspects. The combined effort changed punters’ shopping habits, and by the year 1984 exactly 84 per cent of consumers enjoyed their chocolate on the rocks, soggy wrappers notwithstanding.

A more chilled approach for Safeway’s tie-in fridge competition.

The heat obviously got to the smaller, independent companies, who cast around wildly for celebrity endorsement. On paper, it made sense for Barratt to team up with comedian-turned-singer Mike Reid for their Triffik nougat bar: they shared a catchphrase, his ‘Ugly Duckling’ novelty record had swanned into the top ten, and Runaround was a hit with the kids on TV. But plastering a sweaty, bespectacled, working-men’s club comic’s mug on your wrapper does not a marketing strategy make and poor sales soon meant it had to g-g-g-g-g-go.

The difficulty was creating a countline with staying power. A deserted factory optimistically intended to fulfil national demand for Aztecs was hastily repurposed by Cadbury for the Welcome bar – more fudge, this time studded with hazelnuts – although it soon outstayed its own. The same fate befell the Rumba, which waltzed off without applause. Down south, Tottenham’s own Jameson’s Chocolate staked a claim for the niche, theatre-going market with their sophisticated, rich and dark raspberry Ruffle. Defiantly unplebeian, it wouldn’t be their last experiment with 1979’s evidently bumper crop of Rubus idaeus, but it would be the only one still sneaking through foyers into the Royal Box over three decades later.

As the indie companies bobbed and weaved, scrapping for the occasional title bout, heavyweights like Mars went all out to prove themselves in multiple divisions. Their countlines appeared in new wrappers: king size (regal, decadent, with its own state-funded armed forces) and snack time (instant, disposable, far less of a chore than its grown-up brother). No gap was too small or too large to be filled by confectionery. Then, as Britain lurched towards the European single market, the now-global brands sought to consolidate operations across continents. Why run separate ads for the same product in multiple territories, simply because the local names differed? Think of the poor, confused MTV viewers. Not to mention the money it would save. So, in 1989, Marathon began to carry little ‘internationally known as’ badges (soon swapped for ‘the new name for’) as Snickers’ dominance asserted itself. ‘All that’s changed is the name’ bleated the label, as if that were a mere trifle. Fifty-odd years of carefully accreted brand awareness obscured by a smokescreen: the entirely fictitious threat that Mars just might have dared meddle with the recipe. It had never been on the cards but it was a handy distraction from the fact that Snickers was, and is, a ghastly name.

Stan Boardman’s toffee Fokker never got off the ground, either. Triffik, post-Mike Reid, circa 1978.

LUNCHBOX HEROES

In the bright, razzle-dazzle world of confectionery, the chocolate biscuit (and here we mean the individually wrapped, chocolate-coated type) has always had secondary status. While it’s unquestionably the best bit of any packed lunch you may care to throw together, it never quite reaches the giddy glamour of confectionery proper. This might be something to do with the bakeries: all stout provincial yeomen, imposing brick factories, brass bands on a Sunday, that sort of thing. Not a potential Wonka in sight. Still, they did the job, and after Rowntree got the Kit Kat up and running, they wasted no time in targeting the Tupperware.

An early Kit Kat rival was Glaswegian baker Gray, Dunn and Co.’s Blue Riband, named for some reason after a transatlantic shipping speed record trophy but otherwise conforming to the same anonymous, slightly plain-wrappered image as many a lunchbox chocolate wafer since its debut in 1936. Nothing changed this sensibly clad state of affairs – not the changing of brands to Rowntree in 1967, or the drafting in of Mike Berry to provide some tuneless Dylan-esque dad-rock for the omnipotent early ‘80s Blue Riband Blues TV campaign.

Even when the formula was jazzed up with a layer of caramel, as with McVitie’s deceptively succulent Taxi, the result still hid behind stark, two-colour, designed-by-local-authority cellophane.

Communion wafers from McVitie; all hail Taxi circa 1971; bought it, ate it, Bandit (1957).

The same firm’s Bandit, which made a layer of chocolate cream its USP, at least had the guts to strut out onto the counter in eye-catching scarlet foil, even if the claim made by the TV ad’s excitable Mexican stereotypes that ‘great big bar Bandit is as big as a door’ could be accused of pimping the truth. Okay then, how about a bit of demographic targeting? In 1963 Cadbury entered the wafery fray with the groovily named Bar Six, aimed at the moped-riding, coffee-slurping Mod set, who could thrill to its sextuple snappable delights in a happening Carnaby Street boutique. Taking the standard Kit Kat construction and altering the shape, it featured one fab solid wafer slab coated in segmented chocolate. This novel way of getting Rowntree’s lawyers off their back raised problems of its own, though, when a conflict of the properties of chocolate and biscuit gave rise to warped wafers and bald patches on the back. Kids forgave Cadbury the odd mutant bar, and even found the randomness quite endearing (to this day, a child who possesses an all-chocolate Kit Kat attains the status of a playground prophet), but it never got close to pole position. This wafer biscuit lark was clearly harder than it looked.

Moving into more solid territory, Dublin bakers W&R Jacob’s Club range was nothing fancy, but stood out from the rest by means of its dinky-yet-sturdy dimensions – a little ingot of chocolate-heavy joy, wrapped in amusingly oblique wax paper sleeves, featuring visual puns on the name (a golf ball, a playing card... er, and the word ‘PLAIN’ when they couldn’t come up with a pun for plain chocolate – how hard can that be?). This winning combination of gnomic design and plentiful cocoa brought it to within spitting distance of Kit Kat’s throne, but not even a squadron of stage school kids trilling ‘If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club,’ could topple the two-fingered tyrant. Nor could the arrival in 1980 of the Trio, Jacob’s toffee-in-triplicate backup plan, which shot to third place in a matter of months on the back of an ad campaign that cast John Peel and Derek Griffiths in an old Stan Freberg comedy sketch about Harry Belafonte’s recording levels to devastating effect.

Bartered breaktime biscuit bullion. Cadbury’s Bar Six (1965), versus Jacob’s Club (1932).

 

‘No three things are quite as good together as a Trio.’ Self-assembling flip-top excitement and that eardrum-challenging ad.

In 1970 Rowntree upped the ante, spearheading a ‘two-pronged assault on the chocolate biscuit market’. Prong number one – the Fingammie – was destined for the grocer’s dog’s dish, but the Breakaway, a good, solid biscuit bar set in chocolate, engraved with a neat lattice pattern and wrapped in saucy yellow, was destined for great things, especially after 1972 saw Eric Idle reformat his Python ‘Nudge, Nudge’ sketch to come to its televisual aid. There were no such marketing certainties for McVitie’s United bar, which augmented its biscuity base with sprinkled honeycomb pieces. The obvious footie theme was developed into a confusing commercial wherein a substituted player bit into a bar, only to be momentarily teleported into various unlikely situations, insisting to his coach that ‘it was the candy crisp wot did it’. This was later junked for a more straightforward scarf-waving oompah singalong.

From wholemeal to goal meal. Rowntree’s Breakaway (1970) and McVitie’s United (1976) are up for the (tea) cup.

The marketing triumph of the biscuit world must surely be the transformation of William Macdonald and Sons’ chocolate-dipped bourbon derivative, made since 1932 and cursed with a stupid name, from plucky also-ran into the sort of ‘cult’ national institution marketing departments fantasise about to keep their marriages intact. The advent of ITV brought the first tentative knockings – a chirpy chant of ‘Hurry, hurry, Penguin’s on the way!’ – but it wasn’t until 1966 that Derek Nimmo was called in to provide sub-Noël Coward talky-singy duties over footage of quizzical sphenisciformes let loose in public places. Granted, ‘P-p-p-pick up a Penguin’ couldn’t match Frank Muir’s Cadbury songs for ingenious wordplay (‘What’s bigger and best for you?’ indeed), but as a consciousness-invading fruity irritant, it was matchless.

Burton’s noble Viscount is full of surprises, circa 1978.

But enough of the cuboid. How about something round and creamy in your lunchbox? McVitie’s were happy to oblige with Yoyo, the minty digestive in a green foil ballgown, but it was yet another old-timery baking firm that led the way in biscuit discs. Burton’s Gold Medal Biscuits – based in Corporation Street, Blackpool – could match the Yoyo bite for bite with the more regally named (though almost identical) Viscount. Far more important, to Burton’s, the kids and society as a whole, was the Wagon Wheel.

Out of the ovens just as the Cold War began heating up, the marshmallow biscuit sandwich impressed all who saw it by its sheer, austerity-busting size. This duly increased over the years but, aside from the original wax paper envelopes mutating into the regulation foil pack, nothing else was changed for decades. Nothing needed to be. It was the biggest biscuit out there, and so clearly was the winner. The odd advertising campaign helped: 1985 saw Wagon Wheel Week in your super soaraway Sun, and telly ads memorably claimed ‘It’s so big you’ve got to grin to get it in’. Perhaps one of the older boys at the back would like to explain what’s so funny about that to the rest of the school. But the sheer totemic size carried the day.

Wagon Wheels (1948) in Big Country guise. Simple Minds and Aztec Camera varieties just didn’t taste the same.

Not so many of the old guard fared as well at that time, though. A big cleanout at McVitie’s in 1988 saw Taxi and Bandit come a cropper, though the latter briefly lived again in the late ‘90s. The Trio’s reign faded, and the Club mutated beyond all recognition after Danone got their yogurty grasp on it. Some old-fashioned ‘factory gates and cobbled street’ wafers eventually came to the fore, most prominently Tunnock’s, with its olde worlde stat-packed wrapper, but elsewhere it was weird Euro imports and lob-anything-into-the-dough American-style cookies a-gogo. The golden age of biscuitry was over. Insert the sad bit of music from the Hovis ad here.

Warning: may contain gender stereotypes. Burton’s were in no doubt about who wore the trousers in British homes, circa 1978.

TEA BREAK TIME

We humans are an essentially primitive species. Our flabby, wasteful brain is easily fooled. At its heart, there’s the reptilian core, reminding us to breathe, stand upright and open our mouths to put snacks in. Over that, we’ve grown the limbic system, which controls emotions and reminds us, often unconsciously, which snacks we like and which we don’t. Then, finally, there’s the neocortex, responsible for imagination, language and abstract thoughts like ‘Ooh, it’s got two bars! That must mean I get to eat twice as much!’

This, in a nutshell, is about the right level of neuroscientific knowledge required to work in a chocolate factory. Start pointing and naming things like the amygdala and you’re probably over-qualified. But arrange your chocolate bars like schoolchildren in a newsagent’s, two at a time, and the keys to the kingdom will be yours.

Mars was most successful at foxing our equivocal minds with the introduction in 1967 of the Twix, a heady double cocktail of chocolate, caramel and shortcake biscuit, surely the most inoffensive of ingredients.

But if it’s a biscuit, then what’s it doing here? According to the VAT-man, it’s not a biscuit, which means it can’t be taxed as a luxury item. But it’s not entirely a chocolate bar either. It can only be described as a confection, decided Mars; a law unto itself; a snack. Hence the unusual name, so called not only because of its twin-bar nature, but also because it occupies a no-man’s-land ‘twixt biscuit and bar. Initially, it was marketed with a ‘longer lasting’ promise, although that could easily be misinterpreted as a thumbing of the nose to sell-by dates. Then, as if genuinely trying to flaunt its tax-exile status, Twix tried to insert itself into that bastion of biscuit consumption, the Great British tea break.

Traditional nibbles were mocked at every turn. The everyday goings-on of the working class in warehouses, offices and bus queues, already looming large in the adverts, now came with a magic sprinkle of Twix-y dust. Innuendo abounded. The window cleaner couldn’t drop by an open window without offering to share a finger with the secretary. Girls couldn’t meet their fella in the park without giving him one.

It was like the Confessions films re-edited for the under-eights. Ironically, these scenes were almost exclusively populated by soon-to-be-stars of children’s television. Jobbing actors they may have been but, look, there’s that girl from Hickory House. And isn’t that the ponce off The Tomorrow People? And her from Blue Peter with the pop star daughter? Indeed, like a pregnant Janet Ellis, Twix just kept getting bigger through the ‘80s, gaining extra length and an additional ten grams in 1984 to keep up with some of its arch-rivals.

Is that a ladder in your stocking or are you just pleased to see me? Bored ‘Eighties office girls get their kicks with Twix (1967)…

Rowntree’s Drifter, after a slow start, had finally taken off on television. Its ‘real mouthful’ attributes were reinforced by a stereotypically fly Huggy Bear-style dude jive-talking to an old lady shopkeeper ‘for something to jaw on, crispy in the mainstream, and wearing top to toe his Sunday best’. English subtitles were provided for anyone who hadn’t already seen the same schtick done better in the Airplane movies, though the high-fiving ‘skin there, little blood’ coda with a tiny schoolboy was suitably slapstick enough to ensure hilarious playground repetition. The bar itself was nothing more than a predictable, sub-Lion, chewy caramel and wafer affair, though it was unarguably sizeable and sweet enough to floor a diabetic at ten paces. Ain’t no pimp fo’ sho’, but the jive ass bro’ sure is a sugar daddy.

…whereas moody loners prefer Drifter (1980): ‘Speak English, boy!’

Almost identical in looks, but a country mile behind in flavour, Banjo had the air of a bar that put all its money on the horse called ‘nuts’, only to see it romp home in last place. The problem was actually whatever covered the outside of the bars, clearly artificial and lacking in real milk chocolate. No claims were made as to the provenance or pedigree of the ‘flavoured coating’ by makers Mars. Instead, emphasis was firmly on ‘nutty cream filling’, wafer and nuts, more chopped nuts, ‘plus roast nut flavour too’. Like Bounty before it, and lard come to that, just two varieties were offered: blue or red, the latter rumoured to contain toasted coconut.

A cheap-as-chips TV spot reworked jaunty bluegrass standard ‘Oh! Susanna’, as performed by the Christy Minstrels (that’s the vaudeville blackface outfit, not the chocolate in a crisp shell), but with clunkingly different lyrics. Do not ponder the massive creative leap involved in getting from ‘Alabama with a banjo on my knee’ to ‘Banjo, Banjo, Banjo is brand new’, because this fondly remembered ‘70s bar actually hides a dark past. Originally introduced by Mars during post-Second World War rationing, the original Banjo carried even less subtly racist undertones, with the ‘O’ on the wrapper depicted as the thick, red lips of a singing minstrel who was, to use your grandmother’s vernacular, as black as a tinker’s pot.

Strum candy talking – going nuts over Banjo (1978). Nobody mention Deliverance.

Far from brand-new, Banjo had also been previously revived as Trophy, a name that would have fitted more congruently with Kevin Keegan’s Match Winners competition, Mars’s first land grab on football sponsorship. Reasons for the change are unknown (the best playground-sourced explanation was ‘it sounds like a swear word in French’), though it may have been to avoid confusion with Trøffel, two big chocolate-coated bars of truffle and roasted hazelnuts longboated over from Norway by cartoon Vikings. Ja!

Trøffel – for Norsemen of the a-choc-o-lips.

Dubious foreign nomenclature also applied to Balisto, a North Rhine-Westphalia export whose name, far from implying incoming rockets, missiles and bombs (even the Germans aren’t that insensitive) alluded to the dietary fibre within: ‘ballaststoffe’. Small and efficient, this bar packed a lot into its short, stubby fingers. What the Americans would call granola, and the Brits would call digestives, Balisto called ‘wheatmeal biscuit’. Adverts for honey-almond or muesli flavours alternated prominently on Dairy Crest milk bottles. Why? Because this Teutonic teatime trespasser arrived on the crest of an ‘80s health food wave – which also brought us breakfast-cereal-replacement bars Cluster, Tracker and Jordan’s Crunch – even if its second-highest ingredient was hydrogenated vegetable fat. Defending these shores from German invasion, Sharps of York failed to win over the muesli-munching masses with a wheat, nuts and raisin mix masquerading as Swisskit. The similarly single-fingered Rowntree’s Novo launched in 1986 as a ‘healthy Double Decker’ and rival to Cadbury’s extant Go bar – chocolate, raisins, rice and cornflakes on the bottom layer, sesame seeds, oats, rice, coconut and honey on top. But it was too much, too little, too late. You had to get up pretty early to catch Balisto out, as the towels on the sun loungers around the pool proved.

One snack for the outback Tracker (1985).

Cadbury’s first crack at Twix’s crown came in the shape of Skippy, exhumed from its ‘60s grave and revived with a bright, colourful wrapper and a low, low price of 12p. Demand was poor, however, for ‘a crunch in the biscuit and a munch in the middle’, and Skippy’s threat proved as empty as its calories. It even looked like the interloper as part of a combined Cadbury’s Nat West bank account promotion – kids in the ‘80s were always opening bloody bank accounts – offering a £2 starter in return for posted-in wrappers.

Authentic two-fingered salutes were finally flourished Twix-ward after Cadbury invested in new technology and development in the mid-80s, specifically in the field of chocolate texturing and extrusion. One of these, declared the Bournville boffins modestly, would be ‘the next Wispa’. The results were kept as far out of sight as possible during the test phases, with Spira (in search of a ‘young and active’ teenage market) only available in the Granada region and Twirl banished to Ireland.

Initially sold as a solo bar, the latter eventually went two’s up in 1990 to make it appear less like a Dipped Flake, and survived by virtue of an execrable ‘can’t top the taste of a Twirl’ campaign. In stark contrast, Spira and its ‘clean, crisp taste’ went toes up.

Fickle Fingers of Fate — Twirl (1987), Spira (1987) and Time Out (1992).

Cadbury’s final roll of the dice was Time Out, the teatime break with Flake in the middle, although even then it was only launched after a stuttering redesign process to make it ‘modern’ and ‘chocolatey’ enough. Invented by Craton, Lodge and Knight, Cadbury’s go-to hothouse of product development (and just how many blue-sky brainstorms did it take to think of sandwiching 78 per cent chocolate between two wafers?), the product came long after the name, which had been registered for years in the hope that the rise of American sports in the UK would give it some traction.

Time Out was positioned firmly in grown-up territory, fully formed and ready to dunk in your tea. Choc Dip, on the other hand, exhibited an altogether more hands-on ethic for primary school kids. Biscuit fingers and chocolate again, but separated into constituent parts by Halifax-based KP Foods for messy DIY snacking. (Portion-pack servings of Ferrero’s Nutella provided similar fun, unless the tuck shop fridge had solidified the spread into a dense, unyielding block. In which case: chocolate lollies!) In 1990 Choc Dip’s entire TV advertising budget was binned and the money instead spent on a ninety-foot hot-air balloon shaped like the cup container which travelled the country on a Phileas Fogg-style two-month tour.

KP’s Toffee Dips, circa 1981.

By this time, even Twix had stopped going on about its superior binary qualities, preferring instead to rattle on about abstract ideas like the ‘snack gap’ and its suitability to fit therein. Accordingly, our primitive brains had wised up and were no longer taken in by the twin-pack trick. It was, sadly, now just our waistlines that had grown flabby.

KNOBBLY NIBBLES

So, you’ve got your basic filled chocolate bar template: an inner core of some stout substance (biscuit, nougat, toffee) covered in chocolate. To jazz it up, you can play variations on a theme within that core. Or, alternatively, you can stick stuff to the outside. Bits and pieces. Nuts. Raisins. Rice. Cornflakes. Anything the machinery and the food and drug laws will allow. Do that, and you’ve got one of the family of odd-shaped chocolate bars that aren’t, but perhaps should be, known collectively as ‘the knobblies.’

Raisin ‘arris owner. The changing face of Cadbury’s Picnic (1958).

The family has its origins in the venerable, if slightly lumpy, shape of the Rowntree’s Nux. Seven long years in development, what started as a chewy chocolate bar laced with peanuts and raisins finally surfaced in shops in 1957 coated in hazelnuts and Rice Krispies. The extended gestation period, sadly, didn’t prepare it for the harsh realities of the 1960s snack market, and after several under-performing years it finally passed on in 1965.

Chief among its reasons for collapse was the Fry’s Picnic, which appeared within a year of the Nux. This went for the peanut and raisin combo rejected by Rowntree, but built it around a sturdy caramel wafer chassis, and dolloped a generous amount of Cadbury’s milk chocolate over the whole shebang. Later came the addition of the inevitable puffed rice to the mix, bringing it closer to its stablemate from 1963 onwards, the Mackintosh’s Toffee Crisp.

Time for Cadbury themselves to have a go. The Bournville posse intended 1971 to be a year of great things. In a blaze of publicity, they launched nine new confectionery products at once. There was Fresca, a chocolate wafer with a lemon sorbet centre. Harmony, the marbled chocolate bar. The self-explanatory Stroodels, Yoggets and Coffee Irish. And Husky, an attempt to cross over into the cheesy snack market. None of these, perhaps unsurprisingly, lasted the distance. But the Amazin’ bar, a raisin-stuffed lump of nougat, looked like a winner. Squat and solid, it burst onto the TV screen with a cockernee knees-up testimony: ‘It’s Amazin’ what raisins can do!’ And it was, up to a point. But in an already crowded marketplace, the bar soon went the way of the Aztec.

Then things got confusing. In 1972 Mackintosh launched the Prize, which aped the Picnic’s peanut and raisin coating, but applied it instead to a core of fudge. This they brought out at exactly the same time sister company Rowntree unleashed the Nutty, which was what you got if you took a Prize, removed the raisins and chocolate, injected it with caramel and wrapped it in transparent brown cellophane. And if you did that, you deserved what you got. Fortunately the ad campaigns allowed a distinction between the two products: Prize pitted a hapless commuter against the zany antics of hunger-creating cartoon supervillainry. Nutty, meanwhile, cleverly drafted in Kenny Everett to make a selling point of the bar’s irregular shape, to wit: ‘It’s got so many knobbly bits it can’t stand up on its end!’ Unfortunately, it turned out it could accomplish that feat perfectly well, so the oddest USP of the 1970s had to be faked by the use of a magnet under the table.

Fudging it. Picnic’s doomed rivals – Rowntree’s Nutty (1973), Mackintosh’s Prize (1972), and Cadbury’s Amazin’ Raisin (1971).

Then five years later they were at it again. This time, though, they played the long game. The Lion bar was, to all intents and purposes, one scoop of peanuts short of a Picnic, but instead of going for the wacky branding angle, respectable wrappers and ads showing noble beasts in majestic repose gave the knobbly genre an altogether classier, more adult image. (Whether or not this move into maturity was done to counter the alternative image of these bars, as exemplified by a common pub trick based around their similarity to a freshly voided human turd, remains unrecorded.) Alongside the Yorkie, it helped Rowntree bite a hefty chunk out of Cadbury’s market domination, notwithstanding the contemporaneous launch of their similarly upmarket knobbly effort, the Nunch bar.

Wild thing. Lion Bar (1976), originally designed by Rowntree’s Allan Norman.

Licking its wounds, the beast of Bournville retired to its laboratory for an extended period, leaving the knobbly market in a steady state for the rest of the ‘70s, save for a reshuffle in 1979 when Nunch became Star Bar, and Jameson’s brought out the Nudge (hazelnuts and fudge, natch), and the Oh Yes! Bar, a nougat ‘n’ peanut creation with the totally uncalled-for addition of a layer of raspberry jelly. In 1980 Cadbury finally emerged with a concoction of biscuit, peanuts and raisins they considered a world-beater. The public didn’t agree, and the Ticket went straight back to the depot.

‘When you wish upon a Nunch’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Star Bar (1979), via Nunch (1976), and the cheapday return Ticket (1980).

Tinkering and testing for another few years, they finally got it right in 1985 with the Boost, a log of coconut and caramel, swiftly joined by biscuit and peanut variants, which cleverly purloined the ancient Mars bar tenet: ‘It’s absolutely packed full of sugar therefore it’ll have you bouncing off the walls – but in an entirely productive fashion.’ Give Your Ego a Boost, suggested the sharp-suited salesmen. Although Cadbury’s collective ego benefited most, as the new bar overtook the Lion within six months of its national launch. Its place was consolidated in the ‘90s when Reeves and Mortimer lent their capering personae to a campaign that probably best describes this whole misshapen family: ‘slightly rippled with a flat underside’.

BAG ‘EM UP

Milton Hershey, straw-boatered, moustachioed caramel toffee manufacturer of Pennsylvania, had toured Europe’s great chocolate manufacturers in the late 1800s, and, upon his return, built a factory of his own. Rather than sensibly nicking the recipe off the Swiss like everyone else in the trade, he set about reinventing the wheel and tried to create a chocolate blend from scratch. This trial and error period lasted for years and, even then, the product ended up – at best – a little sour. (Or, at worst, a little cheesy, vomity and baby-sicky; to this day it remains at odds with British taste buds.) One of his earliest successes, however, was the small, teardrop-shaped Hershey’s Kiss (named after popular Italian chocolates, Baci). In 1907 they started shipping across America inside bags intended for sharing.

Back in Blighty, Cadbury had already introduced a similar product, Choc Drop (later to be rebranded as Cadbury’s Buttons, coyly positioned as ‘chocolate for beginners’, and pushed via cosy, Jackanory-style adverts starring Felicity Kendal or some other woolly-jumpered fairytale-narrator). Moreover, Hershey’s entire mode d’emploi was an homage to the Cadbury family: the garden village built to house employees, the schools to educate their children, and the museums of chocolate production. Though, while the British chocolate manufacturers were faint in condemnation of the foreign slave labour that brought cocoa to their factories, Hershey’s response was to build another, equally altruistic version of his ‘chocolate town’ in Cuba. He was a generous bloke.

Not so generous the punters munching their way through countless chocs, though, eh? So much for ‘share and share alike’, a phrase largely credited to Daniel Defoe, writing Robinson Crusoe in 1719. But surely even his famous island castaway would have baulked at going halves on a bag of Revels. If you bought your choccies on Thursday, there’s very little chance you’d save some for Friday.

Maltesers (1936), Mars Ltd’s brown ball substitute for mini-snooker tables.

It’s a human failing the confectioners capitalised on: for good reason are these so-called ‘sharing’ bags known in the trade as selflines. Add to that the fact that anything sold bagged-up means the consumer is paying for 50 per cent air, and you have an irresistible recipe for profit.

It isn’t entirely mercenary, however. There’s an element of alchemy involved. Small morsels of chocolate melt more quickly on the tongue which, in turn, affects the taste. Bung a coating of sugar on the outside and they can be carried around for a lot longer than a horrid, melty choccy bar. An observation not lost on Forrest Mars, inspired – so the official story tells – by Spanish Civil War soldiers eating pellets of chocolate that ‘did not melt in the hand’ on the long walk to the front line. (Cynics might point out that Rowntree’s Smarties had been on the scene a good forty years by then and even they were unlikely to have been the first of their kind.) While fellow American Hershey lacked a foothold in the European market, Mars turned his eyes on Britain and slowly, surely drew his plans against us.

For a start, his Maltesers were already rolling off the production lines. (Sometimes literally: the factory cleaners’ preferred solution was to stamp on them before sweeping up the mess.) Light, chocolate-covered malt balls, they were originally marketed as ‘non-fattening’ Energy Balls intended to ‘deliver the taste of malted milk’. Nice. A later campaign concentrated on ‘the honeycomb middle that weighs so little’: so little, in fact that in 1967 Mars Ltd found themselves in trouble with Trading Standards’ weights and measures division for overestimating how heavy the packs actually were.

‘Chocolates? No, Maltesers!’ A tut-tutting advert circa 1981.

Just round the M25, George Payne was preparing to dispatch the first consignment of chocolate-covered sweets from his Croydon factory. Poppets (a nickname he’d given his daughter) hit the nation’s cinema lobbies in 1937, in boxes designed for vending machines although not, it seemed, for human hands to open. By the rock ‘n’ roll heyday of the ‘50s, teddy boys and girls could break their flick-knives trying to hack into more than twenty variant flavours, among them the all-nut assortment, cherries, nougat, jellies and brazils (yet to acquire the ‘Just’ prefix).

The Poppet name faded in and out of favour over the next few decades (memorably returning as Skokets rice puffs in 1970, Super Poppets in ‘76 and Toffets in the ‘80s) before rallying in time for a 1985 advert featuring a Max Wall-voiced octopus who encouraged us all to ‘get shaking’.

As had Rowntree before, with their ‘cool milk’ Cabanas, one of many fleeting attempts to harness the power of the portable chocolate drop. See also: the early ‘70s casualties, Golden Wonder Chocomates (buttons, nuts and raisins, advertised by a maniacally gobbling Benny Hill) and Trebor Pips. Galaxy Counters fared better, bunging animal characters on the packets and giving away origami kits (Olly Owl, Percy Penguin, Geoffrey Giraffe, etc.).

At a stretch, they could even be pitched as a learning tool, because each chocolate disc had a different number printed on it: ‘Look, Mummy, I’ve got this many fillings.’ Smarties also encroached into the classroom, commissioning Spanish painter and architect José María Cruz Novillo to create animal alphabet posters. Lucky they didn’t choose Salvador Dalí – those clocks he painted had a tendency to melt in your hand, in your mouth, over landscapes, or anywhere.

It’s a lifetime on the hips for Galaxy Counters (1967).

With the candy-coating problem solved, Mars’s attack on Britain began with Treets. Their three-pronged assault in 1976 took on Rowntree at the toffee, peanut and chocolate fronts. Treets appropriated the ‘melt in the mouth’ slogan lock, stock and barrel from their Yankee cousins, while fellow travellers Minstrels (‘They sound candy crisp, they taste chocolate smooth’) would also occasionally benefit from the same tagline. It was a time of great uncertainty. Toffee Treets became Relays in 1983, Minstrels were saved only by a move up to the floor marked ‘Galaxy’ and Peanut Treets were quietly scrapped at the tender age of eleven. Mars, it seemed, had been playing the long game. Its early M&Ms adverts had tested well, in the Tyne Tees region, for a full two years before the official launch in 1987. The balloon went up. The other chocolate makers readied to shoot it down.

Men from Mars. Minstrels (1976); No meen feet. The indomitable Treets (1976) hold their own against M&Ms into the 21st century.

Cadbury immediately set to work on a new project, codenamed Minder. Sadly, this wasn’t to be an Arthur Daley-endorsed chocolate delicacy for ‘Er Indoors, but instead a ‘new, adult, functional, profusion line’ (an obfuscating industry term for what were basically coated caramel, biscuit and raisin titbits).

Four long years later, they finally emerged; the appositely named Strollers, casually wandering into sweet shops to the tune of Black’s ‘Wonderful Life’ (truly the most depressing song ever to feature in an advert), and sporting a revolutionary foil bag to ensure an unprecedented nine-month shelf life. In the end, a lack of popularity ensured nine months was about all they needed.

Cadbury suffers from Stroller blindness (1991).

Nestlé, too, thought they had it in them to provide a ‘point of difference’, with white chocolates in a dark candy shell, and vice versa. But the British public were not in favour of such continental meretriciousness and steered clear in their droves. Neither a drop in price, nor the offer of 10 per cent extra free could tempt them, so Vice Versas were taken out of circulation. A similar fate also beset Bassett’s Quirks, a chocolate mint developed, as these things so often are, as a result of an agreement with a Finnish chocolate company. Though, in fairness, it probably didn’t help that they were described in public by the Bassett chairman as ‘panned chocolate lentils’.

These days, if it can be crammed into a big pouch and priced for ‘sharing’, it’s in the shops before you can say Toffee Buttons (another ‘60s frippery rebranded and relaunched in recent years as the assorted droppings of the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny). Buttons have turned giant, Galaxy Counters and Payne’s Poppets live on to fight another day. Even Hershey’s, roundly critical of advertising practices until the 1970s, finally made it overseas, with Kisses materialising on UK supermarket shelves in 2011. Which just goes to show, all good things come to those who wait. As do all things cheesy, vomity and baby-sicky.

Buttons (1960) survive the baked-in-a-pie treatment.

AND ALL BECAUSE...

It’s no shock that the boxed chocolate assortment was an invention of those ever-sentimental Victorians. It’s perhaps a little surprising to see how much of the standard formula was in place from the very first British attempt. The Cadbury Brothers introduced their tempting Fancy Box in 1869, four ounces of sensuous creams with come-hither titles like Chocolat du Mexique, or Chocolat des Delices aux Fruits. To top it all off, Richard Cadbury himself provided cute paintings for the lids, including, yes, one of a small girl holding a kitten.

‘All the fun of the share.’ Quality Street (1936)

Exotic variety, poncy names, cutesy artwork: the mould was cast. Soon, familiar names appeared: Cadbury’s Milk Tray in 1918 (formerly the Savoy Assortment), Terry’s All Gold in 1931. Rowntree, not being quite at home with chocolate making, came relatively late to the party, but made up for tardiness with canny marketing. A thrown-together box, Tried Favourites, stiffed in 1927, sending them back to the drawing boards, during which they planned, sifted and market-tested their follow-up for six years.

The all-plain Black Magic was the result of nationwide surveys of 7,000 people and 2,500 shops, which established that these things were indeed bought mainly for women by guilty men. Three years later, the milkier Dairy Assortment, later Dairy Box, went directly for Milk Tray’s crown. Both were promoted by advertising campaigns of astonishing ferocity. Suddenly everyone else was playing catch-up.

‘She’ll love it if you bring her chocolates. She’ll love you if they’re Dairy Box (1936).’ She might be slightly less impressed by the Milk Tray bar, mind.

Mackintosh opened up a new front in 1936, with the release of Quality Street. Two innovations were notable here: the mixture of chocolates and plain toffees with individual cellophane wrappers, cheaper and more cheerful than the usual chocs; and the start of nostalgic packaging. The assortment was named after a fluffy West End hit from the pen of J.M. Barrie, concerning the romantic fiddle-faddlings of society girl Phoebe Throssel and the dashing Captain Valentine Brown during the Napoleonic Wars, who were pictured en promenade on the box, albeit renamed Miss Sweetly and Major Quality.

A film of the play with Katharine Hepburn serendipitously came out the following year – and tanked. But the chocolates sold enough for Cadbury to launch their twisty spoiler, Roses, in 1938, starting a two-way battle that’s been a seasonal fixture ever since. Others have tried to get a foothold, like Rowntree’s short-lived Tokens in 1962, and Harlequin, Terry’s ‘assortment of magical tastes’ in 1985, but whether in cardboard trapezoid or massive great tin, the two giants held sway.

The end of milk and plain apartheid is ill met by Terry’s Moonlight (1972). Roses (1938), on the other hand, grow on you.

Chocolate boxes proper, meanwhile, were resorting to variations on a theme. Cadbury hit upon the idea of combining milk and plain in the same box, though this being 1962, Contrast still segregated them onto separate trays. (When Terry’s created the similar Moonlight ten years later, they shared the same tray, but were still kept very much apart.) For Mackintosh, it was a quest for the ever-fancier assortment.

Their Week-End of 1956 presented a Technicolor spectacular under the lid, enlisting hot pink cup cake cases, green fondant and candied peel segments to jazz up the standard brown brigade. In 1960 Good News featured a similarly exotic line-up on the inside of the lid, as immortalised by George Harrison in the lyrics for ‘Savoy Truffle’. Terry’s, meanwhile, looked back, using their 200-year history as a springboard for the antiquated 1767 assortment, all done out like a sealed royal parchment. This lavish box, with its sturdy build and sliding trays, had a serviceable afterlife as the ‘secret gubbins’ hideaway of many a ‘70s child.

Mackintosh’s Week-End, circa 1957...

Mainly, though, it was the big three of Milk Tray, Black Magic and All Gold. Milk Tray tended to top the seasonal charts, helped by a James Bond knock-off ad campaign instigated in 1968 by the Leo Burnett agency, which peaked with a jaw-dropping helicopter-to-ocean dive that put stuntman Alf Joint in intensive care, and even inspired Waddington’s to launch a Man in Black board game. From 1947, the brand was supplemented by the Milk Tray bar, eight popular centres wodged together into a misshapen block, a ploy Rowntree copied for a ten-segment Dairy Box bar in 1975. (A later Black Magic bar cheated, by being just plain chocolate.)

Milk Tray; tall, dark and handsome. Auntie Joan; full, fat and queasy.

The fanciful names given to individual chocs, the better to tempt those indecisively wandering fingers, are the stuff of legend. The Quiet Beatle may have favoured ‘a ginger sling with a pineapple heart’, but this was the tip of the romanticised iceberg. Some, like Dairy Box’s Caramont, aimed for sophistication, but ended up sounding like a retired couple’s Broadstairs bungalow. Others were on surer footing: Black Magic’s Montelimar is named after southern France’s ‘world capital of nougat’, you know. The occasional bit of anti-sophistication was soon ironed out: Quality Street’s Toffee Penny laboured for years under the apt, if less enticing, moniker of Toffee Pat.

The 1980s brought a new variation: the un-assortment. Terry’s Neapolitans had introduced the idea in the ‘70s, a tapered box of identical chocolate segments wrapped up like bars, but at least the flavours varied. Once you’d eaten one Ferrero Rocher, however, you’d eaten them all, although that didn’t stop the nutty ball invasion from taking off in no uncertain terms in 1982. Within three years British rivals were punted out, but neither Rowntree’s hazelnut and praline Eclipse, nor Cadbury’s Wishes, a self-confessed ‘quick and nasty’ response to Ferrero in rum and almond, did much to dent the inexorable rise of the diplomat’s favourite.

Terry’s Neapolitans (1922), clearly an everyday kind of sweet.

The only serious rivals were Payne’s no-nonsense Just Brazils and August Storck’s hazelnut-in-caramel-cup line Toffifee, which was German in origin, and as a result prone to confused pronunciation, exacerbated by differing ad campaigns which called it ‘Toff-eef-ee’ or ‘Toffi-fay’, depending on the affluence of the demographic they were chasing that Christmas.

Even in the reliable world of the assortment, things were moving on. Cadbury drafted suction-tipped robotic arms to stoke their chocolate trays, which worked fine until confronted with the rugged topography of the nut cluster. Quality Street did some hefty market research in the middle of the decade, altering the flavour mix as a result, to howls of anguish from many. (Twenty years later they backtracked slightly, releasing a limited edition bag of ‘lost flavours’, including the chocolate octagon and the sainted gooseberry cream.) Others fared even worse: Rowntree put the ailing Good News and Week-End out of their misery in 1988. The odd new product such as Cadbury’s Biarritz, an unremarkable assortment that stood out by dint of its awkward triangular box, scarcely took up the slack, eventually bowing to angry shopkeepers by going rectangular in 1995 before vanishing, Bermuda-style, in ‘96.

Outliers came and went, the big names lumbered on, but the romance was fading from the chocolate box. Packaging was rationalised, with well-loved fripperies like the loose-leaf layer map and inter-layer corrugated divider phased out. Cadbury’s Inspirations briefly revived the ‘secret drawer’ box, but it was too little, too late. Perhaps worst of all, the things could now be bought in petrol stations. Where’s the romance in that? As any gentleman knew, nothing showed class and panache quite like a Woolworth’s Price Blitz sticker.

BEST-LAID PLANS

Which came first, the chocolate, or the egg? It may seem like it has been ever thus, but we have a relatively young industry to thank for this supermarket shelf-hogging symbol of Easter. Sure, people had fluffy yellow chicks and daffodils coming out of their ears each spring, but archaic traditions of egg painting and rolling had largely died out with the Victorians who chased them downhill (and most likely for that very reason). The pious old Quakers of British chocolate, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to marry their religious and commercial proclivities by resurrecting the egg in cocoa form. Luckily, the Society of Friends benefited from a lack of formal ministry, plus an increasingly vague definition of Lent when it came to the renunciation of chocolate. After all, there was nothing in the Bible about it: St Paul’s letter to Ephesians didn’t decree that their home-made Turkish Delight was off the menu, but then it was written some fifteen hundred years before Montezuma and Cortés traded cocoa beans and gold for Christianity and cultural oppression.

Also, the Quakers weren’t particularly ones for observing religious festivals, preferring instead to adopt a policy of everyday simple living. Fry’s first Easter egg, in 1873, was therefore a low-key affair, two welded halves of dark chocolate containing fruit-flavoured sweets. Cadbury replied two years later with a hollow milk chocolate effort, although both were still crumbly, sandy and somewhat harsh. Over in Switzerland, Rodolphe Lindt had found a way round that, an innovation he called ‘conching’ (kneading and blending chocolate to remove the grittiness and transform it into something altogether smoother). This technique almost single-handedly established the Swiss reputation as maître chocolatiers which, from 1952, also witnessed an annual, seasonal exodus of jingling, red-collared gold bunnies. Though let’s not forgive them for inventing the cuckoo clock, eh? Suchard, which clearly regarded itself as the Carl Gustavovich Fabergé of Easter eggs, took to releasing a ‘Spring Collection’ brochure each year, featuring such mouth-watering objets d’oeuf as the Royale, the Elegance and the Privilege. The latter contained an assortment of dark chocolates and liqueurs inside a box emblazoned with a mandolin-strumming, bone china statuette, which either reeks of refinement or the flea market, depending on your upbringing. Less distinguished were the expedient ‘80s tie-ins with Peter Davison-era Doctor Who (particularly as the packaging graphics contrived to furnish the ancient Time Lord with a generous electric erection when viewed from certain angles) and the similarly phone-box-dwelling British Telecom mascot, Buzby.

Bigger on the inside. Suchard’s TARDIS-shaped Easter egg (1982).

Britain responded to the onslaught of Europe’s chocolate soldiers with a spirited Easter uprising of its own. The big players established a reliable and regular range of crazy-paving-patterned eggs housed inside child-friendly cardboard animal shapes, masks and so on, alongside spherical iterations of their bestselling grown-up chocolate box lines. For the kids: Cadbury brought us the broody triumvirate of Henrietta, Harriet and Hilda Hens (all set to lay an abundance of candy-coated Mini Eggs); Rowntree filled their circus-themed eggs with Jelly Tots, Tiger Tots (liquorice allsorts) and Candy Tots (dolly mixtures); and Terry’s hooked up with die-cast toy manufacturer Matchbox to conceal free hovercrafts, tractors and combine harvesters within a chocolate shell (any resulting broken teeth were to be considered a bonus). For the adults, highlights included: a paltry ration of five chocolates under the inaptly named Rowntree’s Reward; the plastic vac-formed moon capsules of the Bournville Selection by Cadbury; and the utter metallic lunacy of Terry’s Moonlight.

Inspiration for hidden DVD menu items since 1967. Cadbury’s Easter eggs go Mini.

Competition was rife; each package more environmentally unfriendly than the one before, each cardboard construction more complex than the last. For a few short months every year the battle raged, like the World Wars preceding it, intense, bitter and richly flavoured. Mars, true to their American parentage, entered the fray late, sitting on the sidelines until finally dropping their own-brand eggs into confectionery’s own Hiroshima in 1976.

Lest we forget, luxury was not solely the province of the Swiss. Home-grown high street outlet Thornton’s lured a few continental chefs across La Manche and cornered the market in personalised, piped-icing eggs nestled in no-frills, paper-streamer-lined baskets. The ‘70s saw the rise of ‘alternatives’ to chocolate, including hideous soya and carob concoctions for vegans that bore only slim resemblance to their cocoa cousins. Neither could the poor escape the tyranny of the ‘chocolate-flavour’ egg, a market-bought, mug-bound impostor that failed to approximate either the taste or the texture of genuine chocolate and whose vendors must have been laughing all the way back to the waxworks.

You do not want to see the hens that these bad boys came out of. Mackintosh’s Toffee & Mallow and Rowntree’s Fresh Minty Eggs (1982).

The decade that restraint forgot further brought us the profit-driven, Easter-all-year-round appeal of filled eggs. Glimpsing Cadbury’s indecently soft-creme-core steady seller, Mackintosh introduced small boxed selections of milk chocolate eggs stuffed full of soft toffee in 1977. Sister company Rowntree stuck with clown-covered chocolate cream eggs at first although, post-acquisition by Nestlé, eventually lobbed a Rolo Egg into the mix. Increasingly, it was an industry that was starting to resent limiting itself to the days between Holy Week and Whitsun. In the ‘80s, John Bradley, brand manager at Cadbury, carefully removed all explicit Easter identifiers from his product’s boxes to prolong their shelf life: no more ‘Good Friday feeling’ for Crunchie, just a couple of bars under a generic milk chocolate egg.

Salvation was on its way. Back in 1972, Robert and Beryl Foskett, a Telford-based couple whose summer-only trade in freeze-pops was leading to lean darker months, had established the white-label Magna Foods company to license children’s TV and toy names in egg form. Triumph soon rolled along in the shape of Rupert Bear, Mr Men and the Munch Bunch, while Norfolk rivals Kinnerton secured a lucrative Disney character deal. Between 1984 and 1989 alone, the UK market grew 77 per cent and, by 1990, Magna was shifting 18 million units a year. Britain had turned itself into another Easter island.

Suchard, now merged with Tobler, aimed to get back into Britons’ good books (and, indeed, the record books) with the world’s largest egg. It stood, tall as a double-decker bus and twice as delicious, throughout Liverpool’s Spring Festival in 1987, before being melted down and dished out as smaller pieces in aid of Save the Children. Waddington’s were drafted in to create novelty cartons that would appeal to the British sense of play. Even the annual catalogue displayed less ostentatious, more pastoral names: Medallion, Springtime, Reflections.

Then, in 1991, Britain finally gave in to the allure of Le Deux: dark truffle filling, cream and gold livery with, crucially, a Belgian chocolate exterior. Our foreigner-owned, sell-out, domestic companies had long since despaired. Belgian chocolate was the final nail in the crucifix. Yes, they could keep the punters shelling out for the familiar, uniform lines forever, but never in a month of Easter Sundays would they be able to come up with such an awesome egg-beater.

A TOUCH OF CLASS

Chocolate. It’s too good for kids, isn’t it? Not that you’d have come to that conclusion in the early 1970s, as the all-out Technicolor assault on the eyeballs of your unsuspecting newsagent browser demonstrated. With new printing techniques doing to sweet wrappers what they’d done to the Sunday papers a decade before, the shelves of your average confectioner looked with each passing year increasingly like a test card on a Philips colour set with the contrast turned all the way up. All sound marketing for the industry’s staple army of knee-high nutters, but the garish outer casings often worked in the same way, for the discerning adult, as a wasp’s stripy arse did for a chaffinch: ‘You think this is doing your eyes in? Wait till you see what I’ll do to your teeth!’ The grown-up palate demanded a bit more class, and so chocolate folk threw as much invention into marketing posh, adult chocolates as the scruffy schoolboy kind.

Chocolate bars could be given a post-adolescent makeover in several ways. Plain chocolate was the simplest gambit. Take Cadbury’s Plain Six, a dark version of the familiar Bar Six wafer, with its erudite credentials underlined by a series of ads riffing on Shakespearean tragedies; Richard III and Hamlet sneaking off mid-soliloquy for a crafty nibble. Plain Six later became Bar Noir, on the basis that two words of French were as good as the entire Shakespeare canon in the sophistication stakes. Class similarly abounded in Cadbury’s Special Recipe, a rum ‘n’ raisin confection advertised on one of those silver serving dishes with the dome-shaped lids that are so posh you only ever see them in cartoons. If you couldn’t be classy, you could always be cosy. Cadbury shifted a walnut variant of their Dairy Milk bars by renaming it Winter’s Evening, sticking a barometer on the wrapper and claiming to ‘capture the feeling of those cosy, pre-Christmas evenings at home’. If that wasn’t soporific enough, there was always the Ovaltine chocolate bar to knock you out of a night – a shipping forecast in a foil wrapper.

Tout ça parce que l’homme n’aime pas Milk Tray! Bar Noir (1970).

It helped if you had a genuinely old-fashioned brand to start off with. No one knows much about the life of Elizabeth Shaw, doughty West Country inventor of the chocolate-covered honeycomb-centred Mint Crisp in the 1930s, but by the start of the 1970s the delicate, individually wrapped discs, fanned out in circular plastic drums, were as much a part of the posher Christmas fare as a tin of Quality Street big enough to stage a circus in was of more down-to-earth festivities.

The combination of mint and plain chocolate, in ever more anorexic forms, reached its zenith in 1962 when Rowntree introduced the After Eight, initially intended as a throwaway test product to pave the way for the ultra-posh Grenzil Assortment – a plan soon scrapped when After Eights started selling out in their own right.

A swish square of savoir-faire presented in its own little black wax-paper cocktail frock, the mere consumption of an After Eight made you feel, by the power of suggestion, as if you were winding down after the world’s wittiest dinner party, even if you were really slumped on the sofa in front of the end credits of Father, Dear Father. As an Audrey Hepburn clone swooned in the ads: ‘They have the same effect on me as camellias and candlelight.

Slipping lissomely between the Mandate and Bisodol ads at Chrimbo – After Eight (1962). Rule one: do not put the empty envelopes back in the box!

They make me feel expensive, pampered and gay.’ A new market was created, into which Mars stumbled in 1968 with their Royal Mints, while Rowntree did it rather better with Matchmakers, boxes of seventy-odd knobbly mint, orange and coffee crisp chocolate sticks built along the same lines as, and far outlasting, their cracknel bars. The easiest, and many would say best, way to take chocolate into the adult world is, of course... bung in some booze. Liqueur chocolates, usually shaped like globular whisky bottles and wrapped in Christmas tree-friendly foil, mouldered in a dusty corner of the sweet shop for ten months a year, but gloriously took centre stage in November as a miniature harbinger of the country’s annual festival of Christ-honouring liver abuse. Indulgence was literally the flavour of the month. Fancy a Boucher’s Celebration Cream Sherry? Then perhaps something from Anton Berg’s Queen of Denmark range: this marzipan-coated plum in Madeira should warm your cockles. As the evening draws to a close, why not round it off with Poulain’s pineapple chunks in rum, or prunes in Armagnac? What’s that? Oh yes, first door on your right.

No need to raid mum’s cocktail cabinet. Happy hour for Hobbits with Sharps liqueurs, circa 1971.

Usually, however, the accent was on sophistication, and it was often French. Long before Ferrero stormed British embassies with their Rocher task force, they had the black tie community in their firm grasp with the ubiquitous Mon Chéri – glacé cherries liberally doused in brandy and covered (or rather, enrobed) in plain chocolate. Meanwhile, Tobler’s Old Masters range collected a bunch of whisky-sodden cocoa capsules in a big posh box with a Rembrandt emblazoned on the lid, as if to suggest the contents were as finely crafted as a Renaissance painting.

Top drawer. Matchmakers’ first of many festive outings (1968).

However, the kings of the Cointreau selection box weren’t continental interlopers, but Bristolian chocolatiers Famous Names, who realised all that chocolaty ‘enrobing’ and ‘lavishing’ was by the by: it was the booze that mattered. Thus, they enlisted the manufacturers of the biggest brands to provide the liquid centres for their bottle-shaped treats: Harvey’s, Bailey’s, Drambuie, Malibu and notorious Christmas indulgence De Kuyper cherry brandy, the drink that lines and churns your stomach simultaneously. By 1985 they were claiming 58 per cent of a liqueur market worth £24 million. They celebrated in style: by making Warnink’s Advocaat available ‘for the first time in chocolate form’. Yeah, thanks for that.

In 1986 they tinkered further, and in the process inadvertently brought the golden era of the chocolate liqueur to an untimely end. Traditionally, the delicate envelope of chocolate had to be protected from its 30 proof contents by a thick, tangy wall of crunchy sugar, lest the Famous Grouse eat through the walls of its dairy prison and make a mess all over the Highland toffee. The sensation of biting through that sugar crust, to let loose the alcoholic syrup within, was a key part of the liqueur experience. So what did Famous Names go and do? Introduce a revolutionary technique called (wait for it) ‘crust-in-situ’, which did away with the need for those naughty sugar walls and provided ‘improved eating quality’. Their words, not ours. Those Harvey Wallbanger truffles never dangled from the tree quite so temptingly after that.