A Beloved Canadian Chocolate Bar Disappears From the Market
By: Ian Austen - NYT
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Neilson Jersey Milk may be the latest victim of multinational food companies’ strategy of promoting their global brands over domestic ones.
The rush to buy Canadian products that was set off by President Trump’s trade war shows little sign of abating. But shoppers now have one fewer option in a beloved, though less than vital, category: chocolate bars.
Neilson Jersey Milk, the signature offering of a company that once dominated the chocolate business in Canada, has been pulled from the market. Many Canadians still remember the illustrations of the bars, with their gold and white packaging, that appeared in the ocean below Nova Scotia on maps of Canada that Neilson sent at no charge to schools — a kind of corporate sponsorship that’s not likely to be permitted today.
Neilson’s candy division passed out of Canadian ownership under the Weston family — which owns Canada’s largest supermarket and drugstore chains and has been the object of public scorn for some of its business decisions — in 1996 and then changed hands several times. It’s now part of Mondelez International, the American corporate giant that comprises Nabisco along with international brands like Cadbury and Toblerone. Mondelez sold $36 billion worth of snack foods last year.
The company did not respond to my questions about why Jersey Milk was no longer for sale or when production in what was originally Neilson’s chocolate factory in Toronto had stopped.
But a spokeswoman told The Canadian Press news agency that Jersey Milk had been dropped because the company found that shoppers preferred other chocolate bars in its catalog, like Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, which Mondelez makes in the same Toronto plant.
Jersey Milk, which was introduced in 1924, is not the only beloved Canadian candy to meet its end this year. Hershey announced it had killed off the Cherry Blossom , a maraschino cherry with gooey cherry syrup that was coated in a mixture of chocolate, shredded coconut and peanuts. It came in a distinctive large yellow box that held a single candy. Hershey — which two years ago announced plans to restart Canadian production that it has yet to fulfill — did not respond to my questions about its decision.
I spoke with Janis Thiessen, a historian at the University of Winnipeg and the author of “ Snacks: A Canadian Food History ,” about the demise of the two candies.
She said that when it comes to candies and snack foods, multinational corporations have a history of buying Canadian brands and then allowing them to wither in favor of brands they sell globally.
“They just want to focus,” she said. “If someone wants to buy a plain chocolate bar, they’d rather that they buy the Cadbury-branded one.”
I saw another example in the beer industry. Since Canada’s two largest brewers, Labatt and Molson, became part of multinationals, they’ve been selling less of their flagship Canadian beers. Labatt’s top seller is Bud Light, and Molson’s is Coors Light, both quintessentially American brands.
This week I went looking for Jersey Milk bars (to photograph — I dislike chocolate myself) before they disappeared. But after cycling around downtown Ottawa for nearly two hours, I came up empty-handed. Some store clerks told me that they hadn’t received any stock in quite a while.
When Professor Thiessen and I first spoke about Canadian snacks in 2018 , she told me she preferred chips to chocolate. That hadn’t changed when we spoke this week, so she had no opinion on the quality of the Jersey Milk bar.
She did, however, have a very strong opinion about the Cherry Blossom.
“Like so many of these snacks, there’s a nostalgia factor,” Professor Thiessen said. “Growing up, that was a traditional Christmas present from my grandparents. It wasn’t Christmas unless you had this horror before you.”
And she missed two chocolate treats that once came from Winnipeg: Paulin’s Puffs, a chocolate-covered marshmallow on a graham wafer base topped with jam, and the Cuban Lunch, a chocolate and peanut bar (its connection to Cuba appeared to be sugar).
After I wrote about the Cuban Lunch in 2018, I learned that it was a favorite of many readers of this newsletter. They included Crystal R. Westergard, an Albertan who had bought the Cuban Lunch trademark, found a recipe, started a company and hired a candy maker in British Columbia to revive the confection.
And she succeeded.
But Ms. Westergard told me that soaring cocoa prices had led her to suspend Cuban Lunch production. All that’s currently available are about 200 bars at a candy shop in Edmonton .
Ms. Westergard and her husband have lined up some new investment partners, she said, and the Cuban Lunch is not likely to vanish permanently.
“They will return,” she said. “We’re waiting for cocoa prices to go down to rational levels.”
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Never was a fan of chocolate and anyhoot I'm still dismayed over the 1955 cancellation of the Avro Arrow ... thanks Diefenbaker.
I grew up enjoying Neilson's Jersey Milk Chocolate bars, but eventually my preference was dark chocolate - more cocoa and less sugar. Where I am now the one that resembles the Neilson Jersey Milk bars is Dove chocoates.
As well, I, too, resented the cancellation of the Avro Arrow. One of my clients was an aeronotical engineer Avro brought over from England, who was going to assist me in importing a vintage Rolls Royce car, but due to the cancellation he returned to England before that could happen.
I don't believe I've ever had a Jersey Milk bar, so no loss here
I think that any brand of milk chocolate is pretty well the same.
Here it WAS.