Who remembers the Cabana bar?
The power of nostalgia
Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?
Over the last few days, I have combined two of my most effective wellbeing strategies: nostalgia and jigsaws. A box with the title 1980s Sweet Memories was impossible to resist last weekend, and I have just completed the jigsaw inside, pictured above. Four days for a 1000-piece jigsaw is about right for me. If I do it any quicker than that, it's a sure sign I am particularly stressed.
As I was born in the mid-seventies, most of the products featured on the puzzle are right in the sweet spot (forgive the pun) for items I would have purchased after walking the five minutes from our house up to Mr Kennington’s shop in the Burcott area of Wells, Somerset.
Opal Fruits, made to make your mouth water!
Notable exceptions for me, at least, are
Sweet Cigarettes (don’t ask, it was a different time)
Sherbet
Sugar Mice
Rainbow Drops
It is surprising how many of the products on the puzzle picture are still in production, and also how many have almost identical packaging 40 years on. But for the purposes of this article, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the bars that I have no memory of and find out a little bit about them.
Let’s start with the Banjo, which is shown in its peanut and coconut varieties on the jigsaw. Apparently, a plain version existed in the 1960s, but it was discontinued well before the 1980s. The two versions in the jigsaw were made until the mid-eighties, before disappearing for good.
Yorkie, one chunk at a time.
The Fry’s 5 Centres Bar lasted a bit longer, into the start of the next decade. It proved too expensive to produce, with five different flavours in each bar. Interestingly, the Fry’s Chocolate Cream Bar, also pictured, is considered to be the first mass-produced chocolate bar in the world. It was launched in 1866.
IPSO is another brand that passed me by. They were apparently discontinued in the late eighties and were sold in the UK and the USA. There is a description online of an advert, which sounds very ‘of its time’, and I suspect that is the reason behind the fact that it has been deleted from YouTube.
Having said that, the advert for the now-discontinued Cabana Bar is still available, and it has not dated well!
The Cadbury Wildlife Bar (top right of the puzzle) seems to have been a precursor to the Freddo bars, but with different animals moulded into the chocolate. This one lasted until the early nineties.
A finger of fudge is just enough, to give your kids a treat!
The Prize Bar, with its suspiciously Mars-like wrapper, lasted in the late eighties. It was produced by Rowntree / Mackintosh, and when that company was acquired by Nestlé, it was phased out. The Rowntree’s name still exists, but they don’t do chocolate anymore - that is all branded as Nestle.
The manufacturer of the ‘creamy fudge’ bar at the top of the jigsaw is impossible to make out on the box, but having completed the puzzle, I can confirm that it was produced by ‘Callard and Bowser’, a company with an interesting history dating back to Scotland in the eighteenth century. Since then, the brand has been owned by Kraft, Guinness, Wrigleys, and finally Mars, before it was finally phased out around the turn of the century.
Lion bar. Bite it, crunch it, chew it!
Finally for this article, in terms of phased-out chocolate bars, we have the Bitz. It was produced by Terrys until the start of the nineties. An interesting fact about Terry’s - until the 1950s they produced a ‘chocolate apple’ alongside their more famous chocolate orange, and yes, it was apparently apple flavoured! I suspect that their Waifa bar, also pictured on the jigsaw, might have also been a victim of the success of the orange!
I simply have to end this article with a mention of my favourite bar featured on the puzzle, one that recently came back from the dead, much to my surprise and delight. The Caramac, for those of you who have not tried it, somehow manages to be a worse but also tastier version of the more popular ‘blonde’ chocolate that is popular now. It is plastic-tasting, far too small, and completely delicious!