The Financial Post is asking, “Why?” It’s ob-vious. Read between the lines. The global price of cocoa has doubled from $2,000 to $4,000. Jersey Milk is 100 percent chocolate! Consumers are showing a pre-ference for other brands…
Yet anther plaint from my childhood over the disappearance from my childhood of another favourite treat. This time it’s a candy staple – for Canadians, at least: Neilson’s Jersey Milk Chocolate…
Any other kind?
When I was just a little tot, there were only a few kinds of sweet treat available – and only if you had been really, really good! One of the most sought-after – and granted only when you had been excep-tionally good – was the solid Milk Chocolate bar.
I thought there was only one kind of Chocolate Bar until I was old enough to go to neighourhood store by myself, with a pocket full of hard-earned, hard-saved pennies, nickels and dimes. And that Holy Grail of treats was always a tough decision to make.
Strategic choices
If your total treat budget was, say, $0.20 to $0.30, you had to make strategic choices. Your menu usually included:
- Rollos
- Tootsie Pops
- Candy Bars
- M&Ms
- Licorice (Twizzlers or Whips)
- … and
- ‘Penny’ Candies
You wanted some of everything. But your whim of the moment usually dictated what you actually bought.
My strategy
Every kid had their own strategy… I almost always chose one key element that set the theme for my Friday afternoon medley. And it was usually a chocolate bar. And that bar was usually a Neilson’s Bar. Before candy makers went nuts and started proliferating their menus, the Bar was the default form in which you got chocolate. Second generation chocolate treats were pioneered by classics such as M&Ms – “melts in your mouth. not in your hand!”
BOOM!
That was the watershed instant when a lot of kids had a Field of Dreams epiphany: When the universe opened up for just an instant to show them was was possible…
And treat shopping ‘by the book’ was never the same. Nor was it ever as easy as it had been up to that point, again!
Candy Bar conundrum…
Suddenly, one became aware of the options within the candy bar ‘community’: Mars, Milky Way, Crunch, O’Henry… The ‘plain, old’ Neilson Milk Chocolate Bar paled by comparison to those mir-aculous feats of flavour and mechanical engineering! How DID they get the caramel in the Caramilk Bar? Then…
BOOM! again…
And you were in your mid-teens, and your face was breaking out and your best child consolation buddy had become the enemy. You didn’t look back until your mid-late 20s, when you were safely past your zits period. Any by then it was too late.
The next time you became consciously aware of the candy counter was when you were looking for the Denyne Gum and stopped short, in shock, at the confounding choice of candies and bars and pouches of all sorts. Many with names and even formats you weren’t familiar with.
Look at those prices!
But, if that wasn’t bad enough, what in the name of… Look at those prices!
A Neilson Bar, or a Mars or a Crunch, which you swore had been a dime the last time you looked was now $0.50 or $0.60 – then $0.75 cents!
The answer was simple, of course. Sugar and cocoa and all the other ingredients in Candy Bars had started their inevitable climb toward where they are today. And what had once been an innocent childhood pleasure became a once-on-a-blue-moon ‘adult’ indulgence.
A loss of innocense
It was the ultimate betrayal by the grown-up world. A loss of innocence. A bitterness no sugary treat could erase.
Then … The bells started to toll for thee… First, the alarm clock bell. Then, wedding bells. Then the school bell, just as you pulled up, all in an ‘almost late’ lather, to drop off your kid(s) at the wrong door…
On the way home, you stopped for a coffee And there, in the familiar glass-fronted case, were the candy bars. You felt congratulations were in order. You had beaten the ‘late’ bell again. But… There must have been some kind of mistake!$2.00 for a candy bar? $2.25, even? The names were the same, but everything else about your nostalgic faves had changed.
A moment of dizziness…
A moment of dizziness almost compelled you to pull the car over until you recovered.
The bars seemed about 30 percent smaller than they had once been. Instead of the 6 or 8 bites they used to be, they now lasted only 3 or 4. And they were nowhere as sweet or satisfying.
In a panic, you started Googling the topic, and learned about ‘shrinkflation’, ‘fair trade’, ‘sustain-ability’, and a whole bunch of other words that hadn’t seemed real to you up until then.
My take
What happened was that the world had sneaked up you… As you passed through your 20s, your childhood craving for sweets had naturally declined. Manufactuers had had to make bars smaller while increasing their prices to remain profitable. As the cost of labour, machinery and especially ingredients rose – slowly but steadily. While you weren’t looking.
That was your coffee-shop-epiphany moment.
And there, on the cover of TIME, was the story about how cocoa prices had shot up from $2,000 to more than $4,000 per pound over the past 18 to 24 months. And what candy makers were doing to counteract the sales-slaughtering effects of retail price increases made necessary due to suddenly-higher ingredient costs.
A matter of perception…
Glancing over at the Neilson bars – which were now $2.95 each – you wondered what the world was coming to…
~ Maggie J.