Discontinued Halloween candies from your childhood that silently vanished
When Reggie Jackson returned to Yankee Stadium, fans threw Reggie! Bars onto the field. That bar is gone now, and so are others that used to sit next to it in the bowl: the eight-inch caramel, the fruit chew with the liquid center, the peanut butter cookie bar that was selling just fine.
Six candies follow, each documented and gone for a reason usually stranger than poor sales: a corporate merger, a melting problem, and one company family’s reported dislike of peanut butter.
Eight inches of braided caramel
Mars introduced the Marathon Bar in 1973, an eight-inch caramel bar covered in milk chocolate. It was discontinued in 1981 because of poor sales and because it didn’t fit on store shelves. The closest living relative is the Curly Wurly, which you can still buy in the UK.
“If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me”
Reggie Jackson said it, and the bar arrived two years after. The Curtiss Candy Company launched the chocolate, caramel, and peanut Reggie! Bar in 1978. It was gone by the early 1980s, after Curtiss’s parent company merged with Nabisco and the licensing changed.
Why did Mars pull a bar that was selling?
Because, reportedly, the Mars family didn’t like peanut butter. PB Max, a chocolate-covered peanut butter cookie bar, arrived in 1989 and sold well, and Mars reportedly ended it anyway.
Giant fruit falling from the sky
That was the premise of the absurdist television commercials for Bonkers, the rectangular fruit chew with a liquid center that Nabisco launched in 1985. It vanished in the mid-1990s. A revival brand arrived in 2018, but the original is gone.
1992 to 2006
That’s how long Nestlé’s Butterfinger BBs, the bite-size version of the classic bar, lasted before it was discontinued over melting issues. Butterfinger Bites arrived in 2009, but they’re not the same product, and fans, boosters, and skeptics alike can tell.
A petition didn’t save Alpine White
Nestlé first released its white chocolate and almond bar in the 1980s and discontinued it around 1993, despite a petition to bring it back.
The bottom line
They didn’t vanish loudly. They stopped showing up in the bowl, usually because of a merger, a melt, or one family’s taste in peanut butter.
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