Chicken Dinner Chocolate bar

After searching around the internet, I came across an article titled ‘The Best Discontinued Snack Foods From the Decade You Were Born’ 4 posted on The Daily Mail, Dan Myers wrote an nostalgic article about discontinued food from decades ranging from the 1920’s to 2000’s. These products either didn’t sell or got bought up by larger companies (eg Nestle, Hershey, Heide or Curtiss). This

Chicken Dinner point of sale box

article mention an oddly named chocolate bar called

Chicken Dinner, one of about 30.000 candy bars which came out in the 1920’s, was introduced in 1923 in America by ‘Sperry Candy Company of Milwaukee’ had a quite re

Fig 1, 1924 Chicken Dinner ad

markable success. Although it’s name was “Chicken Dinner”, it didn’t contain any chicken. An ad in 1924 described Chicken Dinner as “An expensive, high-grade candy”(Fig 1). It was filled with nuts and coated in chocolate. The main target group for this candy bar was children. The popularity of Chicken Dinner came from it’s marketing. While other candy bars got their names from wholesome ingredients, such as ‘Milky Way’ which came out the same year, Chicken Dinner went the counter-intuitive way and embraced the product’s oddness with marketing that touted the bar as “Distinctly Different”.

The bar was released 6 years before the Great Depression struck, it’s has been incorrectly linked to the Rebublican Party’s 1928 campaign pledge to provide “A chicken in every pot” - perhaps the most misassigned quotation in American political history. 5 Chicken Dinner seemed to promise value for cash- strapped Americans. Broekel describes it’s appeal in “The Great American Candy Bar book” 6

“Chicken Dinner was one of the early nut-roll bars and first came out in early 1920s. The first Chicken Dinner wrappers pictured a whole roasted chicken sitting on a dinner plate. In the years following World War I, the economy made many familys feel fortunate if they had one good meal a day on the dinner table. A whole roasted chicken on a candy bar wrapper symbolized something substantial in terms of food value.”

What made Chicken Dinner so successful was the heavy marketing. Sperry helped sales using billboards, magazine adds and, most notably, a fleet of trucks decorated to look like chickens. These trucks canvassed the U.S after Sperry dropped the price of the bar from 10

cents to 5 cents. It’s safe to say Chicken Dinner was ahead of it’s time regarding advertising due to it’s originality. After spending 40 years in the shelves, the product got discontinued in 1962 due to Pearson’s buying Sperry.

It took many hours to finally find a suitable product. Chicken Dinner fitted the needed requirements perfectly as it became discontinued in 1962 - this was the most important requirements, but hard to find. Chicken Dinner chocolate bar would need some serious redesign - perhaps even re-branding to be recreated. It never had to be adjusted due to the 1966 Act, therefore it needs to follow new laws and requirements to be a legal product.