This thread, talking about how ‘chocolate has gotten thin’, reminded me of Hershey bars. Now, I have an idea that your typical Hershey Bar With Almonds was bigger when I was a child than they are now. I don’t know, though, as I haven’t googled it. And I don’t much care for Hershey’s chocolate anyway. Maybe they changed the recipe since the '70s. Maybe my tastes have changed. But one thing I do remember is the wrapper.
A month or so ago I bought a Hershey Bar. It was contained in a plastic envelope, and one opened it by pulling along the seam. This is not how to open a Hershey Bar. There is a Ritual. At least when you’re a kid. You take the bar out of the freezer. (I always liked them frozen.) The chocolate was wrapped in foil-paper, and the foil-paper packet was enclosed in a paper sleeve. You pushed the foil through the sleeve. Often, it would be held in place by a little drop of glue so that you had to ‘snap’ it loose. Perhaps you’d slide the wrapped chocolate part-way through the sleeve and then reverse direction, just because you could. With the sleeve removed, the foil-paper wrapper would be carefully opened. Why carefully? It’s not like you’re going to save it. But it was folded so nicely. Besides, you wanted a surface for the next step. One didn’t just grab the candy and shove it one’s gob. No, one had to see where most of the almonds were. You’d break off a piece of the bar from the end with fewer almonds and work your way down to the almond-rich end.
The newer wrappers? They specify which end you should tear. And you use it to hold the entire bar; biting off a bit of chocolate instead of breaking off a piece like a civilised child. Perhaps the new wrappers are better because there is less wrapping. On the other hand, the old wrappers were paper. I don’t know what happened to the foil, but the paper backing the foil and the paper outer sleeve were biodegradable. (Heh. ‘Biodegradable’. A word that was popular in marketing in my youth.) What do the plastic pouches do? I’m sure the newer packaging is cheaper though, and probably extends the shelf life slightly.
But if I ate Hershey’s chocolate, I’d miss the old packet-in-a-sleeve.
Less than ten years ago my mom called me one day and said she had a recipe she was trying to make that called for a nickel-sized Hershey bar. Neither of us knew what that meant in current context or relative to when the recipe was given to her.
I have an aversion to American chocolate but have recently discovered Belgian chocolate from Walgreens. The brand is Walgreen’s Delish. The nearly one pound bar is milk chocolate with toffee and sea salt and sells for a mere $3.00. It’s addictive!
The wrapper is also what seems to be a strange amalgam of paper/plastic and difficult to get the first tear in.
Doesn’t the Sky Bar still have a cardboard sleeve? I haven’t had one in a while, so I can’t say for sure.
Funny thing, as a little kid, about 50 years ago, most candy bars cost a nickel, but the Sky Bar was a dime, so I NEVER bought a Sky Bar. then in the mid-60s, the price of the other candy bars was raised to 10 cents, but the Sky Bar remained at a dime. So I switched to Sky Bar, because, I guess, of the higher perceived value. Of course, as I got older, when candy bars reached a quarter, I switched to cigarettes. Then 20 years later, I switched back to candy bars to get off the butts.
I also remember getting chocolate from the UK at Christmastime and it was so, so, so much better than chocolate on this side of the pond.
My Gran used to send us each a huge Cadbury’s bar and it was to die for. It was like the difference between pasta at an Italian restaurant and a tin of Chef Boyardee.
Bit-O-Honey had crimped cardboard to keep the candy segments separated. A good marketing idea would be to print ads on it for local dentists, to call as the candy sucks out your fillings.
I remember those separators as being waxed paper. And yes, Bit-O-Honey is still around - both wrapped and in bar format.
Look up “Old time candy” - in addition to one group which uses it as their name, there are dozens of web businesses selling memories - wax teeth, wax bottles (with cardboard carrier) - all those childhood memories for boomers and younger.
