Is there a way to find out how much candy bars weighed back in 1945, then compare them to the ones from 1955, 1965, 1975 etc. ? I think some good ones to chart would be Baby Ruth, Hershey Bar and 3 Musketeers.
Here are Hershey’s wrappers through the years. Some have weights on them.
So, it looks like a Hershey Bar went from 1 3/8 oz to 1 or 1.05, and yet we keep getting fatter and fatter. The cure to the obesity epidemic is clear: eat more chocolate!
Current Baby Ruth bars are 2.1 oz. I found a couple of very old wrappers online that showed 1 3/10 oz.
Really?? Maybe the “Incredible Shrinking Candy Bar” is a myth?
I guess it depends on when the trend started. The wrappers I found listed the price as 5 cents, meaning they’re pretty darn old. They could have grown and then shrunk again in the past 60-80 years.
I do know that many candy companies began making mega-sized bars a decade or two ago. Snickers comes to mind, among others.
I’d like to leave aside candy bars apparently exposed to gamma radiation for now…like the pair of 1/2 lb. Reese’s Cups I saw at Wally World just last week.
<seinfeld>Yeah, want’s up with that?</seinfeld>
Seriously, do you eat these things with a spoon or what? Hey wait… I knew this would come in handy some day.<drags out giant laser>
Now they have “King Size” packages which probably weren’t available back then.
Right, I figured those were not in play. I just mentioned them to show that there is a market for large candy bars out there which may also impact regular bars.
Combo meals at fast food joints are famous for getting larger, while ice cream containers have gotten smaller. I wonder which trend candy bars have followed.
Then there are selection biasers. While king size candy bars existed when I was a kid, I notice now that at my local convenience store they are the default option presented near the cash register while the standard size ones are relegated to the bottom of the candy row.
So even if the regular size candy bar has shrunk I suspect that the average size candy bar purchased has grown.
I dunno, I remember in the early to mid 70’s when candybars started absurdly shrinking almost to mini-sized, because all the companies were trying to keep the price at a dime. Then suddenly they all went “fuck it”, increased the price to a quarter and made them bigger again.
goo goo cluster seems thinner and smaller now. They were my favorite candy in college.
For sure the largest shrinkage of a bar still around has got to be Charlestown Chews. I remember when they were about ten inches long. You’d put them in the freezer, take 'em out and wack 'em and have chews for days. Now they only come in “Fun” size.
Holiday store near me still sells the full sized ones, and you can buy them by the box from Amazon if you can’t find them locally.
What would I do with a box of Charlestown Chews? Eat them, that’s what! No way am I gonna buy a whole box them.
O.K., I could buy a box of chocolate CCs because I don’t like them. But then that would be even stupider than buying a whole box of vanilla CCs because I’d have spent the money but won’t have the diabetes to show for it.
Throw them in the freezer and hide them behind things so you don’t see them the minute you open the door.
This is a great question, and one I have wondered about too.
I remember a regular candy bar being 10 cents… And then, they started shrinking.
The size is not the same, and the price has continued to rise, but there must be some cost/chocolate bar ratio that we can use to track the price of chocolate/weight of chocolate.
Fun Size used to be a reasonable, smaller sized chocolate bar. Now it’s not fun… It should be called “joke size”
I assume Charleston Chews shrunk because so far I as I can tell I’m the only person I’ve ever met who likes them. When, over the years, I’ve mentioned them as a favorite I get responses that generally express concern for my mental health.
At then eventually I noticed I rarely see them in regular candy sections.
Sometimes I also wonder if candy bars have really become smaller or if I am now just much bigger in proportion.
The 1906-1911 Hershey bar was 2 3/4 oz. That was a dime. The 1912-1926 nickel bar was 1 3/8 oz. The 1928-1935 nickel bar was 1 7/8, so it went up 1/2 oz and stayed the same price. The 1936-1940 nickel bar was 1 5/8 oz, going down in size. The 1940-1950 nickel bar was 1 1/2 oz. 1951-1968 they’d shrunk to 1 oz. When they doubled the price to a dime in 1969, the bars went up to 1 1/4 oz. Twice the money for 25% more chocolate. Then they raised the price to 15 cents. The size went up to 1 5/8 oz. By 1973, the size went down to 1.4 oz. In 1978 the size was down to 1.05 oz and they didn’t put the price on the wrapper.
StG