When I was a kid I didn’t like Chunky bars. There was just something about raisins and chocolate that reminded me of those carob covered raisins that were foisted upon me as an alternative to candy (which makes it sound like there was a choice). As I got older I think I appreciated them more, mostly because the texture of such a “thickerer” slab of chocolate offers a different taste experience.

Back when they were first introduced in the 1930s they were larger (of course) and featured Brazil nuts, cashews and raisins. Today they’re made with raisins and peanuts ... I’ve always thought of them as what would happen if you dumped your Goobers and Raisinets into a dish and let them melt & reform into a bar.

The bars were originally made by Philip Silvershein and through a gentleman’s agreement with Wrigley, delivered and marketed along with their gums. Later the company was sold to the Ward-Johnson Division of the Terson Company, which oddly enough also bought up the Blumenthal candy group which made Goobers & Raisinets. Nestle bought the Chunky bar and friends in 1984. They changed it from a single chunk to four segmented chunks, I’m guessing in an effort to promote sharing.

The bar is beefy looking. Even though it’s thick, the sections are truly easy to snap apart (I don’t know how easy it’d be to break up otherwise). It smells rather sweet and more of rum and peanuts than chocolate. The chocolate is okay, it seems creamier than the stuff in Crunch bars. The bar reminds me of a cheap version of the Ritter Sport Rum Trauben Nuss. Since it’s a fraction of the price (at 33 cents) I can’t really complain of it not living up to a bar that’s usually three times the price.

For your enjoyment I dug up some old commercials.

This jingle from the early eighties says “you’ve gotta open wide to get a Chunky inside. Open wide for a chunkier bite.” The commercial also reminds me that they were actually one big piece back then instead of the four segmented block.

This one also references that same tagline, open wide.

This commercial is from the mid or late eighties ... and I’m guessing by the content that it’s from around the time that Nestle bought the candy bar. Note that the varieties available is down to two at the end tag. This one also shows the four segments for the first time. See how YouTube has become and candy archaeologist’s best resource?
This video also finishes with another commercial that mentions Old Nick which I just wrote about the other day!

Links: Retroland, Patti at CandyYumYum has an actual wrapper to prove that there was a Pecan version & JCruelty’s reviews of a variety of enduring candies (strong language)

Related Candies

1. Bit-O-Honey
2. Payday Fresh from the Factory
3. Dark Raisinets
4. Revels

Way back in the day there was a cute little candy called Tart n Tinys. They were tiny little pellets of tart candy, kind of like SweeTart, only sold in a small cigarette-pack-sized box that dispensed the candies from a little slip-tab at the top. (Nerds are still sold in this format.) They were made by Willy Wonka Candy Company, which was founded by Breaker Confections in 1971 just in advance of the feature film, Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. The book (called Charlie & the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl was published in 1964 and already wildly popular as was James and the Giant Peach which came out in ‘61.)

The Wonka line of candies were largely a marketing invention, the only candy in the original line up of confections that was actually mentioned in the book were Everlasting Gobstoppers.

However loosely tied Tart n Tinys were to Wonka’s imagination, I loved them. The little chalky pellets were fun to sort and stack, simple to share and easy to portion. The original flavors were Cherry, Lemon, Lime, Grape and Orange. The texture always seemed a bit smoother than SweeTart, which had a chunky and gritty texture (which I also appreciate).

In 1988 Breaker Confections sold the brand to Nestle. Nestle eventually made some changes to the candies, mostly because they had also recently acquired the Sunline brand of SweeTart confections in their takeover of Rowntree (who bought Sunline in 1986). Sunline products (SweeTart, Sprees and Bottle Caps) were then branded under the Wonka label as well. In the early 1990s Tart n Tinys were reintroduced with a new colorful candy shell (more like mini Spree than mini SweeTart now). The most interesting part of the candy shell addition is that the grape ones were no longer purple, they’re now blue (but thank goodness they’re not the blue punch flavor of SweeTart).

The new candy coated variety were also a little rounded, so they roll. No more stacking. But I have to admit they were fun to look at, and probably a little easier to sort even in dim lighting conditions.

So, you may have noticed that I started this post with, “Goodbye.” This is because Nestle has decided to discontinue both Tart n Tinys and Chewy Tart n Tinys.

It makes sense that Nestle thinks that the line is redundant (as I found with the head to head comparison between the Chewy Mini SweeTart and the Chewy Tart n Tiny) to products they already produce. The marketing on them was never particular strong, they don’t do seasonal editions (no pastel Tart n Tinys for Easter, no red & green for Christmas) so it’s easy to see why people have not responded to them as much as other products like SweeTart, Sprees and Runts.

I’ve enjoyed Tart n Tinys since their introduction but rarely buy them simply because I never find them in stores. Runts have been more available, even in the movie style box. I don’t think I’ve actually bought Tart n Tinys in five years for this reason. How successful can a candy be if you can’t find it in the first place? There are still a few online vendors who still have inventory left, so if you’re a fan, get ‘em now!

UPDATE JUNE 2015: Leaf has revived Tart n Tinys in their original format of the uncoated cylinder shape.

The flavors are a little different: blue raspberry, grape, orange, lime, lemon and cherry. They’re still making their way around stores, I found mine at Dylan’s Candy Bar for $3.49 a bag, which is too steep for what is cheap candy, but they should get wider distribution eventually.

Read the full review here.

Related Candies

1. Baby Bottle Pacifier Tarts
2. Candy Blox
3. I Miss: Bar None
4. Goodbye Reed’s
5. Bottlecaps

Bit-O-Honey is one of those candies that I’m always surprised (and pleased) to see that they still make. And why wouldn’t they? There’s nothing else like it out there.

Bit-O-Honey was introduced in 1924 by a company called Schutter-Johnson Company in Chicago, Ill. Schutter and Johnson later split (Johnson went on to invent the PowerHouse bar which became a Peter Paul product, a nougat, peanuts and caramel product covered with chocolate, something I’ll have to write about further later).

Schutter’s made a nice variety of chewy goods including the Bit-O-Choc and the Bit-O-Coconut and a chocolate bar called Old Nick that featured milk chocolate over fudge and nuts.

In the 1960s Schutter’s sold out to the Chunky folks who discontinued the Old Nick citing that it competed with their much more popular Oh Henry! Then in 1984 Nestle bought Chunky and the now orphaned Bit-O-Honey. (There may have been some intermediate companies in there for a while too, candy history is mighty confusing!)

The smiling bee on the wrapper didn’t appear until the late seventies and later got arms as he does today.

Nestle has kept the bar largely the same as when it was first introduced. They even still make the six segment bar with the wax wrapper dividers. This is an interesting way to sell the candy and solves one of the enduring problems for taffy bars ... how do you eat it? Many taffy bars are easy to smack on the corner of the table and break into pieces (but who knows how those pieces will be sized?). The assortment of bars from Annabelle’s and items like Laffy Taffy suffer from this (though Laffy Taffy also makes the ropes, which I think are probably the best format for a large quantity of taffy).

The Bit-O-Honey segments break apart pretty easily, though I always end up with a little smidge of paper on the back side of each piece where the candy has folded over the waxed paper. (It’s not the end of the world if it ends up in your mouth though ... not like the foil on a Hershey’s Kiss if you have fillings.)

As long as the candy is fresh and soft, it’s a pleasant and surprisingly long-lasting chew. There are notes of honey as you would expect, as well as a smooth and creamy flavor of almonds. The chew is consistent to the very end, instead of descending into some grainy mess as many caramels do. There’s a little egg white in there, which is part of what give it the smooth chew (a little different timing on the cooking and it could be nougat).

Bit-O-Honey are also sold individually wrapped, but I’ve never liked those as much (they’re a little boxier in shape). They tend to be firmer (or rock hard). There’s something about the bar that I’ve always loved.

I don’t buy them very often, for fear of pulling out fillings (though I’ve never actually lost a filling on candy ... I lost a filling once on scrambled eggs and cracked a tooth on a rock in a bean salad once). It was nice to see them on shelves again at the 99 Cent Only Store and even better to find the product virtually unchanged.

Related Candies

1. Sugar Babies
2. Doscher’s French Chew Taffy
3. Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews
4. Clark Bar

These are from Japan and come in a few different varieties. They’re called Inside Out KitKats. I was calling them Naked KitKats for a while until I found out the real name.

They’re a KitKat without the coating. The bar is longer (about 5.5”) and generally larger. The center filling is lightly flavored. I think the one pictured is Chestnut.

A few KitKat variations out there seem to be breaking the rules of KitKats ... KitKats are supposed to be multi-bars that can be snapped into fingers to share or enjoy slowly. (I’ve never met anyone who just chomps on a whole KitKat.)

But this comes down to the discussion of what should be included under a particular candy “brand”. When I think of Reese’s, the essential element is peanut butter and the secondary element is cups ... the third element is chocolate. You can add things in there, but but taking away more than one of those essentials just mucks with it so much that it ceases to be a Reese’s.

The same goes with KitKat. It has to be fingers (even if the fingers are sold individually), it has to have crispy wafers and it has to have some sort of chocolate coating (be it white, milk or dark). Here we’ve lost the coating and the “fingers” have become as large as rods.

Okay, so maybe they’re not KitKats. What are they? They’re cookies. Cookie wafers with a cream filling and I dare say it, they’re no longer candy. They fall into the confectionery category, but out of my realm of specialization.

Naming and placement on the taxonomic chart of candy aside, these are okay. The wafers are certainly crispy, but they’re also dry. There’s not enough cream filling to give them much of a flavor, and subtle is fine, but there’s so little going on here. I’d say they’re the perfect summer candy bar because there’s no worries about melting, but there’s also so little moisture here I’m worried about dehydration and these sucking what little fluids I have left out of my system.

I tried two flavor sets: chestnut and mango. Chestnut is pleasant because the sweet nutty flavors go with the cream sweetness. The mango was just weird, the pine-type flavors of the cream just seemed to fight with the bar on the whole. Perhaps if it had a bit of a tang to it or recognized more of the juiciness of the fruit instead of just the flavor, it might have worked more. Of course that would be an even larger departure from the KitKat-ness.

I still have a few of these left (and I’ve had them since January - both Amy in Japan and Santos gave them to me) and even when I eat them and find them okay, I keep forgetting I have them and when I see them sitting there I have no impulse to eat them.

Related Candies

1. KitKat Temptations: Hazelnut & Coconut
2. KitKat Pumpkin
3. I Miss: Bar None
4. Men’s Pocky

I had really high hopes for the new Nestle Crunch Crisp bar. I found it on Friday while I was filling my gas tank and wandered into the convenience store because it was so freakishly hot. (Okay, maybe it’s not freakishly hot, it was the end of June in Southern California, what should I have been expecting at four in the afternoon?)

The blue metallic wrapper is promising and describes this as “Crispy Wafers, Chocolate Creme.” Sadly, it also doesn’t list chocolate as an ingredient. Which leads me to wonder what the essential element is to be called part of the Nestle Crunch line of products ... apparently it’s not chocolate, it’s crisped rice. I’m sure there are volumes of marketing research that prove this.

The bar consists of sturdy planks of bland wafers filled with a greasy and grainy chocolate cream, topped with some crisped rice and a slurry of thin mockolate (63% of your daily value of saturated fats!).

Here are the ingredients:

Sugar, Wheat Flour, Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil, Alkalized Cocoa, Nonfat Milk, Crisped Rice (rice flour, sugar, barley malt, salt) and 1% or less of High Fructose Corn Syrup, Soy Lecithin, Artificial Vanilla Flavor, Salt, Baking Soda, Lactic Acid Esters, TBHC and Citric Acid, Ground Peanuts.

While this all comes off as rather negative, I think I might find this tasty when the ambient temperature is below 90 degrees. Even at 85 degrees, however, the bar was a slippery mess (this is one of the differences between mockolate and most chocolate). It was certainly creamy and the crispy wafers were distinct and crunchy. But the mockolate and chocolate creme just weren’t up to delivering any flavor to the mix. It wasn’t too sweet though, as the bland wafer and crispies were a good counterbalance to the mockolates. Honestly, the crispy wafers were good.

This would be an awesome bar if it were real. If there were some sort of real chocolate on there, something with character and depth, I could completely get behind it. In the mean time, I’m going to stick to my also-high-in-full-hydrogenated-oils Chocolatiers.

Candy companies are still getting the hang of this internet thing, so you can go to the website listed on the package, ForTheKidInYou.com, but I couldn’t find any mention of this bar there. On a slightly related note on the mockolate front, here’s an article from Reuters ... that Cebele May they mention, that’s me (plus Emily from Chocolate in Context!).

Related Candies

1. Baby Ruth Crisp & Nestle Crisp Bars
2. Q.Bel Crispy Wafer Bars
3. Wonka Tinglerz & Nestle Buncha Crunch
4. Nestle Milk Chocolate
5. Nestle Crunch (Now Even Richer Milk Chocolate)
6. I Miss: Bar None

Australia has not been left out of the KitKat craze, but they’re a little harder to get a hold of. One of my co-workers happens to be married to an Aussie, so on his last trip to visit family I gave him some bucks and asked for anything that caught his fancy (knowing me of course). Some I just ate, but these I thought I’d at least share a little about.

KitKat Temptations: Coconut Eclair: The big dome over the narrow little pair of wafers is filled with a sweet and mildly coconutty cream. The cream is kind of a cross between the inside of a York Peppermint Pattie and a truffle. Not quite smooth, not quite buttery, but not as crumbly as the fondant of a York.

The cookies don’t even take a back seat here, they’re on a trailer being towed behind. One of those shocks that would greet you as you were looking to change lanes and saw that the Coconut Eclair had passed you and you were trying to get out from behind some mollasses Slo-Poke and didn’t realize that they had that wafer cookie trailer bouncing along behind, without lights or any of those red dangly flags. Then you slow down and smack your own forhead and say, DUH! It’s a KitKat!

KitKat Temptations: Hazelnut Praline: This one smelled kind of like maple, but perhaps pecan, if we’re talking about nuts. I know Australia is a half a world away, but I also know they grow hazelnuts, so I can’t quite figure out the lame taste on this one. It’s all very sweet. The nutty cream center is rather like Nutella, but lacks that nutty punch. Instead it’s flavored like nuts, but doesn’t taste like them ... ya know? There are a few little crushed nuts in there (as there should be, the picture on the wrapper illustrates them) but they just didn’t strike me as hazelnuts. They could have been almonds.

Yeah, I’m just not getting the KitKat vibe here. KitKats are all about the wafers, grainy cream and chocolate. Anything added is great, but don’t muck with the basics.

You may have tempted me once, but you’ll not snare me again.

I tried the Nestle Dark Stixx last year and thought they were pretty good. They’re a little crispy cookie wafer in the form of a tube filled with some cream and covered in chcoolate.

The Butterfinger Stixx were introduced at the same time, but it took a little while for me to find them super-cheap. They were stupidly expensive at $2.29 for a box of 6 when they came out. But at the 99 Cent Only Store this little package of two was a respectable 33 cents and still fresh (expiration July 2007).

What’s great about these is the one thing that you can’t get in a Butterfinger ... real chocolate. Not that the chocolate is great, but you know, if it’s not tasty at least it’s not fake.

The package describes this rather oddly with a little four point diagram:

What I suspect after reading that is that this is more like a Butterfinger Crisp bar (which may be running one of the lamest commercials of the year, sorry, as far as I’m concerned that girl has to be high if she’s enjoying a Butterfinger Crisp and thinks that’s really laugh-out-loud funny).

The little stick has that familiar peanut butter and buttered popcorn scent. The sweet chocolate and bland crunch of the wafer are a nice combo, not too sweet. The creamy center is nothing like a Butterfinger, it’s soft and reminds me of that peanut butter filling that comes inside those cheesy orange peanut butter crackers. The peanut butter flavor is pretty mellow and rather lost. It’s sweet and a little salty, not very creamy and not really notable beyond that.

The little sticks are tasty but not very satisfying. I completely missed the “sprinkle of candy bits”. On the plus side, this didn’t stick to my teeth like the industrial-strength-cement-like Butterfinger filling can. I think if I’m looking for a stick shaped peanut butter candy I’ll stick to Atkinson’s Peanut Butter Bars. (No chocolate, but still tasty.)

Other thoughts: Victoria at Candy Addict liked them, Taquitos.net gave them a positive, Chris at CandyCritic gives them a 3/3/4 Lord Jezo gives them two cheeses.

It’s summer movie season. I’m not much of a movie-goer, mostly because I don’t like to go out (I have this same problem with vacations), but I do enjoy movie cuisine of the sweets variety. (Nachos and hot dogs do not belong at the movies ... those are ballpark foods.) Today I have three classics.

Sno-Caps were introduced in the twenties by the Blumenthal Chocolate Company. These are just tiny chocolate chips with a coating of white nonpareils. The combination of the mellow semi-sweet chocolate with the sweet crunchy white dots makes them ideal for munching for two hours. The box encourages me to “Mix it Up! with Popcorn” but I’m kind of a sweets purist at the movies ... just candy, thanks!

The semi-sweet chocolate isn’t terribly smooth, but it has a good chocolate flavor to it and a little dry and bitter hit towards the end. Of course the sweet little sugar spheres mellow that out pretty quick. The crunchies encourage me to chew these instead of letting them melt. But sometimes I like to let them all melt in my mouth so I’m left with a mess-o-nonpareils for some real crunching.

At the very end things can get a little messy with the orphaned nonpareils at the bottom of the box ... or the bottom of my purse if the box isn’t sealed completely. A quick tip of the box and I have some good crunching. If I miss my mouth, well, luckily they’re rather inert.

(Note: Sno-Caps semi-sweet chocolate now contains milkfat, so is not suitable for vegans.)

Rating: 7 out of 10

Goobers came along in 1925, though the idea of chocolate covered nuts had already been around for centuries (though not very affordable until the turn of the century). To me Goober was a character on The Andy Griffith Show. It wasn’t until years later I found out that goober is actually slang for peanuts. (That was about the time that I started seeing Goober from Smuckers on the store shelves (peanut butter and jelly in the same jar).

Goobers are one of those easy to eat candies that don’t get you all hopped up. There’s a lot of protein in there from the nuts, so they don’t get my blood sugar all in a tizzy. The chocolate is very sweet and not terribly smooth, but with the crunch of the nuts in there I rarely suck the chocolate off, so it’s not very noticeable. My only complaint with Goobers is that sometimes the peanuts aren’t very good. It could be that I’m getting an old box or the peanuts quality control isn’t that good. A bad peanut is, well, bad.

There was a jingle for Goobers & Raisinets which has always stuck in my head (probably from around the same time as the Mounds & Almond Joy song).

Goobers, Raisinets
Chocolate Covered Treats
Raisinets and Goobers
Mighty fun to eat!

Rating: 7 out of 10

Raisinets were the third part of the movie candy puzzle, they were introduced in 1927. The idea of Raisinets had been around for years, often sold as part of a mix of panned nuts and dried fruits known as “Bridge Mix”.

These are nicely sized raisins, soft and chewy, sweet and tangy. The chocolate, on the other hand, is super sweet, slightly grain and rather bland. As a kid I pretty much detested Raisinets. I eat them far more often now, but unless the chocolate is really good, I’d rather eat raisins.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Nestle has a strange website to promote these candies, called Nestle Classics which emphasizes them as good movie candy. It’s kind of odd, since the only candy in their “Classic” lineup that they originated is the Nestle bar. All the other bars and candies in the array were acquired from other companies (Chunky & Oh Henry).

So, what are you eating at the movies this summer?