A History of Sweets in 50 Wrappers. Steve Berry

      Then, cometh the ‘80s, cometh the Cadbury’s Wispa. Big trouble in Rowntreeland as the potential Aero spoiler was worriedly picked over. Luckily the two-year gestation period Cadbury took to get the Wispa going nationwide allowed Rowntree to remake the Aero in its image. By September of 1982, gone was the six-segmented flat format, a bumpy chocolate version of the traffic-calming measures in a well-to-do Cotswold village. In came the handy ingot size. In the process, something – no one was quite sure what – changed. The chocolate had become softer. No, the bubbles were bigger. No, it’s the taste... It scarcely mattered, as the new bar more than held its own against the Bournville parvenu. But even today, plenty of former stalwart Aerovians feel slighted by the changes, their enzyme glands no longer stimulated in quite the same way.

      A sign of civilisation. Aztec (1967), swiftly sacrificed to the gods of chocolate nostalgia.

AZTEC

      This is a tale of two cultural cornerstones. On the one hand, the mighty Quetzalcoatl, feathered serpent god of the ancient Aztecs, who gave his people the sacred gift of chocolate via a beam of heavenly light, bringing them universal wisdom and Type 2 diabetes. (Sadly, the one bit of knowledge that might have been some use, namely ‘If you see these Spanish blokes with big shiny helmets, run like the clappers,’ slipped the feathered one’s mind.) In the blue corner, there’s the equally legendary rival to the Mars bar, opportunistically cooked up by Cadbury in a lean period and promoted with a travelogue-swish TV campaign filmed at one of your actual Mexican temples, only to vanish mysteriously four years later. The former lived on for centuries in folk memory and overpriced Acapulco gift shops. The latter enjoyed a similarly fertile afterlife, becoming the de facto nostalgic touchstone for the first wave of alternative comedians (Ben Elton’s swing-top bin was so long unemptied it had ‘Aztec wrappers in the bottom’).

      It’s perhaps fair to say that Elton’s championing of fair-trade didn’t tally too well with the Aztec’s imperialistic undertones, a state of affairs not helped by the life-size cardboard warrior chieftains installed in newsagents the nation over, to the innocent delight of kids who’d gleefully perform a culturally inaccurate whooping war dance around them. All this happened, of course, while the Milky Bar kid was doing his bit for the Native North Americans. To complete the continental clean sweep, the 1980s, when you’d have thought people would have calmed down a bit, saw the launch of the otherwise unremarkable Rowntree’s Inca. We could, of course, all be very smart and ironic about such things by the time the Aztec made the slightest of slight returns in the year 2000.

      Instigating a Mexican crave. Safety-pin propaganda on behalf of Cadbury.

      Dessication’s what you need. Bounty (1951).

BOUNTY

      There was always something indefinably odd about the Bounty. It wasn’t the bar itself. ‘Tender coconut, moist with pure syrup, lavish with thick chocolate.’ Nothing unusual about that. We’d been here before in 1950, with Rowntree’s ill-fated Cokeroon bar. Maybe it’s the way the Bounty featured two bars in one pack, without making a song and dance about it. Always suspicious when a chocolate bar keeps something like that to itself. And the way it did it – not side by side, but in series, with a little jerry-built piece of black waxed cardboard guttering underneath to take up the inevitable slack, leading uncertain youngsters with fond memories of the rice paper on the bottoms of macaroons to try to digest the whole thing. All most irregular.

      Then there were the adverts. ‘A Taste of Paradise’ had been around since the mid-’60s, and was fairly self-explanatory. Coconut = tropical. Dead posh, like. Fair enough. The problems began in 1977, with the ‘Bounty hunters’ TV campaign, showing a weird tribe of well-groomed, lightly tanned Caucasians lounging about on a tropical island somewhere, having left civilisation behind. How could they look that good out there? Especially when they existed entirely on Bountys?

      Not only that, they made the bars themselves. Somehow. We saw a coconut being deftly cleft in twain. Then a sheaf of perfectly wrapped bars floated down a limpid stream on a raft of palm leaves, for the tribe’s womenfolk to pick out and chew absent-mindedly under a waterfall. The intervening stages of manufacture were missing. Where were the grunts shredding the coconut? How did they get hold of the syrup? Whither the glycerol processing plant? And the guttering mystery remained. Worse still, the original flute-led musical backing from Howard ‘The Snowman’ Blake now featured scene-setting lyrics. ‘The Bow-own-tee-hee HUN-ters, are here/They’re searching for PAR-a-dise...’ trilled a woman who sounded constantly worried she’d chosen a falsetto too high to sustain. This explained nothing.

      After 1978, this fair-trade wonder had to compete with the Rowntree’s Cabana, which added caramel and chopped glacé cherries to the coconut mix, testing the retentive powers of even the strongest stomach. So they made attempts to assimilate into the real world, acquiring catamarans and scuba gear and moving into the more general ‘sun-kissed lifestyle’ aspirational bracket loved by lazy Martini account holders and Duran Duran. Structural improvements in wrapper engineering rendered the guttering redundant. The tremulous falsetto became a schmaltzy cover of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’. The message was: ‘Hey, it’s okay! We’re not strange at all any more!’ Nevertheless, the Bounty is still looked at askance by your average British consumer. Still, it could have been worse: in America it’s called Mounds.

      Hare necessities. Cadbury’s Caramel (1976).

CADBURY’S CARAMEL

      Cadbury had a big year in 1976. On the downside, there was the Rowntree’s Yorkie. More positively, there was the Montreal Winter Olympics, all over which the Goodies appeared in TV ads urging hungry kids to swap ten Cadbury wrappers (oh, and £3.60) for a transistor radio in exciting blue denim!

      Then there was the launch of the Cadbury’s Caramel.

      You could tell this was a classy bar. For a start, it was frighteningly expensive, even in those times of vertiginous price rises. It was also very neat, each section being a little sculpted pillow of chocolate, delicately engraved with the Cadbury livery. Let there be no idle talk of ‘chunks’ here. All terribly sophisticated, very grown-up... and a tad dull, to be honest. This product needed sexing up.

      Enter five-foot jobbing actress Miriam Margolyes, who took one of the least promising briefs ever (‘Right, so you’re this lazy, but saucy, West Country rabbit with a chocolate obsession...’) and turned in thirty seconds of sub-Bristol vocal smouldering that was destined for immortality. The cartoon blurred the line over who the product was aimed at slightly. Was it responsible to tell children ‘arses are there to be sat on, have some chocolate’, via a buck-toothed erotic trade unionist? Nevertheless, a surprisingly timeless campaign was created.

      Cadbury took their own advice and took it easy, letting the anthropomorphic amour carry the weight. The bar’s sales never troubled the top ten, but the ‘exclusive’ price kept it afloat. In 1993, enter the Galaxy Caramel. Panic on the streets of Bournville! Well, okay, a bit of a rebadge and a new recipe. It saw off the competition, but it’s hard not to view this most successful of also-ran bars as a bit too much in temperament like its skiving mascot, and too little like her industrious, if slightly thick, woodland pals.