It has always been one of life’s most searching questions – where can one buy Wonka bars? Or more specifically – where can one buy original Wonka bars?
The Quaker Oats Company, who also financed the original Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory film, made the first Wonka bar in order to capitalize on the release of the first film in 1971. This bar was an exact replica of the bar featured in the movie and contained a golden ticket – unfortunately the chocolate tasted horrible and the bar was quickly withdrawn from the market. The wrappers of this version were brown with an orange and pink border and a top hat over the "W" in Wonka, similar to the film's logo. This was the classic Wonka bar design that is still much sought after today.
A Chicago company called Breaker Confections produced a new range of Wonka bars during the 1970s and 1980s, before Nestle bought the rights to the brand in 1988 and started producing their own range. The first Wonka bar by Nestle featured purple packaging and consisted of milk chocolate with bits of Graham crackers inside. Over the years Nestle have added new flavours but, unfortunately, the Nestle range of Wonka bars has never really captured the public imagination the way the original bar did and Nestle have had to re-launch their range on more than one occasion.
In 2012, Nestle pulled their latest Wonka range, called Wonka Exceptionals, from the UK market due to poor sales before re-launching a brand new range twelve months later. In the meantime, an imitation bar that was designed to resemble the classic 1971 bar was in wide circulation. The origins of this bar were a bit sketchy and there was much publicity during the Summer of 2013 when Trading Standards officials seized a large quantity of these bars from shops around the UK due to the packaging containing no information on ingredients or place of origin.
Where to find original Wonka bars with the golden ticket? You can search for Nestle’s products or the imitation version produced by “chocolate pirates” in the UK. But, considering the popularity of the chocolate pirates imitation, maybe a better question to ask is this: why don’t Nestle produce their own 1971 replica? It would certainly fly off the shelves!
