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My appetite's worked up. Slow down, damn it. Oh, you idiot, don't slow down. Don't slow down.
Explore the 100-year history of Snickers, from its origins as 'Chicken Dinner' to its global popularity and cultural impact.
Key Takeaways
- Snickers evolved from an earlier product called 'Chicken Dinner' with a misleading name.
- The Mars family played a crucial role in developing iconic candy bars like Milky Way and Snickers.
- Snickers became a cultural icon in Russia after the Soviet era, symbolizing new consumer freedoms.
- Advertising and marketing have been key to Snickers’ global success and cultural integration.
- The candy bar market continues to evolve with new products and shifting consumer trends.
What the video covers
- Snickers originated as 'Chicken Dinner' in 1923, a chocolate bar with nougat, peanuts, and caramel, misleadingly named during the Great Depression.
- Frank Mars created the Milky Way bar inspired by his son's favorite milkshake, which differed significantly between the US and other countries.
- Snickers was launched by Frank Mars with roasted peanuts and named after his favorite racehorse, eventually replacing 'Chicken Dinner'.
- The video discusses the evolution of candy bars in the Soviet Union, including simpler recipes and unique products like Hematogen.
- Snickers became popular in Russia post-Perestroika, symbolizing capitalism and new foreign treats in the 1990s.
- Mars and other global companies expanded their market presence in Russia, with Snickers becoming a beloved candy bar.
- The video highlights the extensive advertising campaigns and cultural events promoting Snickers, including limited editions and street festivals.
- Domestic Russian confectioners created alternatives and rip-offs of Snickers, with 'Step' being a notable competitor.
- The video touches on naming conventions and marketing strategies of other candy bars like Twix and Butterfinger.
- It concludes with reflections on the future of candy bars amid changing consumer preferences and emerging trends.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Early History of Snickers
- 00:52The 'Chicken Dinner' and Great Depression Era
- 01:45Milky Way Origins and Differences
- 02:36Creation and Naming of Snickers
- 03:33Modern Convenience and Yandex Promotion
- 04:17Candy Bars in Soviet Russia
- 05:15Snickers in Post-Soviet Russia
- 06:11Advertising, Cultural Impact, and Competitors
- 07:52Naming and Marketing of Other Candy Bars
- 09:45Conclusion and Future of Candy Bars
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Slow down. Before energy drinks took over the world, we had our own legal teenage doping. Grab a Snickers and go skateboarding, skydiving, rollerblading, and rapping.
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Honestly, I didn't want to open my mouth without you. At least, that's what marketers have been claiming for decades, convincing us that a carbohydrate-sugar bomb is fuel for extreme sports. But, in fact, Snickers is just a cheap knockoff of a chicken
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dinner. And that's no joke. It was under this name, "Chicken Dinner," that the Spy Candy company released a chocolate-coated nougat, peanut, and caramel bar in the US in 1923. The only thing chicken was the name, and advertising posters featuring chickens
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misled many consumers. Chicken doshkas hadn't been invented yet. The Great American Depression was raging. Robots were tight on cash. And apparently, this odd naming paid off. Rooster dinner. The year the chicken dinner was introduced, Mars hadn't had much of a
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Snickers presence. Only Milky Way had emerged. The story goes that confectioner Frank Mars received an interesting request from his beloved son: package the flavor of his favorite milkshake in a solid format. Hence the Milky Way in the name. While
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experimenting with the recipe, Frank coated a whipped, sugary leg with caramel, topped it all with a chocolate layer, and voila. This format proved a hit. It was marketed as a full-fledged chocolate bar, but was cheaper and more accessible, since the chocolate was
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only on the outside in the form of a thin glaze. Inside were penny-pinching calorie substitutes. And compared to a chicken diner, the customer got more or less what they expected, and the taste was truly reminiscent of a solid
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milkshake. By the way, if you didn't know, Milky Way in America and Milky Way in all other countries are completely different bars. The recipe for the original American Milky Way is more similar to the bar we know as Mars.
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And it originated not in America, but in England. And it wasn't even invented by Frank Mars, but still by Mars.
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Forrest Mars, the very same son who witnessed the birth of this entire bar saga. The little boy dreamed of worldwide fame for his chocolate bars, and his dad wanted stability and peace in his old age. So Forrest set off to
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conquer Britain. There, before inventing several new chocolate bars, he continued producing the same Batin' Milky Way, just in case, renaming it the laconic Mars. A treat for the whole family. But Dad stayed in the US, and even before his son's departure, adding
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roasted peanuts to the Milky Way recipe, or perhaps having spied the ingredients of Chicken Dinner, he launched mass production of the Snickers bar, named after his favorite racehorse. Snickers was more easily understood than Chicken Dinner, despite essentially using the same recipe. The
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new bar didn't offer false chicken hopes, so it won the day in the long run. And no one remembers the legendary chicken anymore. Frank himself didn't exactly live to see Snickers' triumph; he died in 1934, just two years after
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Forrest's departure. After the founder's death, the business passed to his widow, and his son, despite much strife and conflict, consolidated the family business only in the 1960s and ultimately realized his vision of making Dad's bars world-famous. But that's just the beginning. Damn,
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honestly, all these stories made my stomach growl. Replacing a full meal with a candy bar was a bold statement, even for advertising in the 1920s, when the day was jam-packed with things to do and there was no time to cook.
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Between going without food and grabbing something on the go, there's a more interesting option. Yandex has a new section called "Obedomania" for this purpose. There, you can order a full meal, soup, main course, and salad without interrupting your daily routine.
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Everything you want for lunch while you continue working or enjoying your favorite activity. And delivery from "Obedomania" on weekdays from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM costs just 49 rubles. So, even when your day is scheduled down to
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the minute and autumn is bustling with events, with Yandex you can still find your favorite dishes for lunch. Take a look for yourself; you're sure to find what you're craving today. Link in the description. So, throughout the 20th
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century, all of America, and Europe for that matter, became hooked on a wide variety of candy bars. It was the USSR's turn in Tsarist Russia.
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Factories like AM and the Lenov merchants, the future Red October and Rodfront, packaged candies in luxurious boxes and supplied the Imperial Palace with sweet delicacies. The Soviet regime tightened the screws on bourgeois excess, and chocolate bars became simpler. Many recipes were
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simplified or new ones were invented, right down to the appearance of conveyor-belt tea bars, ground nuts, and soy flour. The word "batonchik" (baton) in the Soviet Union was more synonymous with the humble Soviet Proline, which is still produced by
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Rodfront to this day. But to me, the legendary Hematogen, made from bovine blood, had a much closer vibe to Snickers. This isn't your vegetarian chicken diner. The name literally translates from Greek as "blood-generating." Hematogen was actively fed to children, disguised as
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a regular sweet, to boost their iron levels. So, for many, this essentially brutal product became associated with a small joy from childhood. Soviet people only caught wind of Snickers around the time of Perestroika. And, of course, candy lovers were thrilled to try this
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exotic and inaccessible foreign chocolate bar. And then, in the 1990s, the curtain fell, and a flood of all kinds of foreign sweets burst onto the empty post-Soviet market, instantly transforming into show-offs, symbols of change, and simply unusual new treats.
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Having forgotten about their own candies, people were ready to fork out for a single, wretched Snickers bar, drag it home, and, with trembling hands, slice it into thin slices so they could experience this capitalism of yours with the whole family. One got a
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caramel, another a candy bar and a half, and a third was allowed to sniff the wrapper. The family banquet was a success. Over time, such delights became increasingly accessible, and, having struck gold, global corporate giants rushed to carve out a niche.
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Best acquired the Samara factory Rossiya, and Mars, in addition to Snickers, launched other hits that remain on shelves to this day. But it feels like Snickers has become the most popular and beloved candy bar in our country. Its accidental product,
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Placeman, was featured in the computer game Poly Wonders. He even appeared a couple of times in Yerolash. Are you stupid, smashing it like that?
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Plus, Snickers VRF advertising campaigns often had a distinctive flair, starting with the slogan itself: "Keep going, Snickers, Snickers." A tata that has become ingrained in the subconscious of generations. Limited editions specifically for Russia, for example, with sunflower seeds in the
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recipe, also added to the brand's reputation. Try Snickers with sunflower seeds. And besides, giant Transformers are kicking a ball around in TV commercials, while entire Snickers street culture festivals, like Urbania, are held under the auspices of the chocolate bar. All
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this flair in the 2000s was incredibly cool. Enormous sums were poured into advertising, and they paid off.
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Domestic confectioners also tried to snag a piece of Snickers. Some died heroically, and a few even hit the jackpot. In the battles on the Russian candy bar front, the clear winner is probably Step, which, overall, does a pretty good job of copying the original
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recipe. A truly Russian answer to Snickers from the Slavyanka factory. Oh, I mean, not Snickers, but Chicken Dinner, of course. But alongside decent alternatives, a whole army of rip-offs flooded the shelves. And in the display cases, alongside the normal chocolate,
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such cursed masterpieces as Katya Kat, Trix, a
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the real world, too. In the UK, Snickers was officially called " marathon" for a long time. Most likely, the name was changed because "Snickers" sounds similar to "ms," which means women's panties. But eventually, as globalization progressed, the British
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were forced to chew their underwear, and "marathon" became "Snickers." Or take Twix sticks, for example. In a number of European countries, this product was officially called "Raider." The reasons for this naming can only be speculated upon. To avoid confusion,
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everyone eventually came up with the single name "Twix," and along the way, the brilliant myth about the left and right sticks supposedly being different in some way was developed. The confusion surrounding the names of some chocolate bars is still relevant today.
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Just compare the American top sweets with the list we're accustomed to. The prime example of this mind-blowing phenomenon is, of course, good old Milkiway, which kicked off this whole candy bar craze. We've already figured out that in the US, a dense caramel bar
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—a pure Mars equivalent—is sold under this name. But what about the fact that the familiar white nougat Milkiway has always been known there as the Three Musketeers bar? And that's just where the confusion begins, since there's only one musketeer in the
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package. But in fact, when it launched in the 1930s, there were actually three : chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla bars in a single package. The splurge ended during World War II, when sugar and flavoring supplies began to run short. Two musketeers were culled to
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cut costs, leaving a lasting taste. For a long time, the Musketeers remained a purely local American theme, until a nostalgic frenzy brought them to the global screen. In "Stranger Things," Dustin literally lures the slug Demogorgan with this candy bar, proudly
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christening him "D'Artagnan." And this isn't just a random Easter egg; fat Amash is the iconic Gooner or Gooner of '85. The Duffer brothers simply copied the legendary scene where Chubby Chunk shared a chocolate bar with the slot monster. Only in the original, the
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monsters were lured with another American snack, the infamous BP bar. Damn, how deep is the black hole in this Milky Way? In the 1920s, the American CPC factory pulled off a stroke of genius brazenness by re-releasing its caramel-nut candy bar
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under the name "Bruh" at the very height of Babe Ruth's national love affair. Naturally, no one paid the athlete for the use of his name. And when a lawsuit was imminent, the lawyers came up with a brilliant excuse
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. They claimed the bar was named after the former US President's daughter. And apparently, cashing in on the name of a girl who had died of an illness 20 years earlier in order to save money on a baseball player's contract was
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perfectly acceptable for corporate bosses. The craziest thing is that the court believed it. And when the real Babe Ruth later wanted to launch his own chocolate bar, these same confectioners sued the athlete himself for stealing someone else's brand.
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However, the factory didn't stop at one scandalous BRU. The baseball fetish clung to these confectionery scammers for a long time. Having won the name from a living sports legend, the factory bosses decided to consolidate their success and dropped their second
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smash hit in 1923. For their next creation, they launched an open public contest to find the best name. And from hundreds of entries, the winner was " Butterfinger," a real-life baseball slur for clumsy athletes who can neither throw nor catch a ball. The
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marketers didn't argue with the results and rolled out a product proudly named "Butterfinger." Oh, and the filling was a toxic orange, crunchy mess of burnt sugar and peanut butter that permanently cemented the teeth of American children. Toward the end of
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the century, the era's greatest rebel helped sell this peanut butter to American schoolchildren. The brand is inextricably linked to The Simpsons, where Bart aggressively fought off anyone who dared to steal his favorite candy bar in dozens of iconic
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commercials. Today, the candy business is developing in a surreal paradox. Measured in tons, candy bar sales are steadily declining, but measured in dollars, the giants 'profits are skyrocketing. The secret lies in shrinkflation. Companies are quietly cutting the weight of their chocolate
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bars, selling less food for more money. Perhaps extreme sports have disappeared from advertising because these bars no longer contain enough energy to perform somersaults on a skateboard. Recently, an Englishwoman unearthed a 1991 Mars bar while cleaning her house, and it
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turned out to be 56%larger than its modern version. And yet, it was once cheaper. And, alas, this corporate thirst for cost-cutting reveals the dark side of the candy business. Behind the bright wrappers and cheerful nostalgia lie endless lawsuits against
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the Mars Nostleys for using child slave labor on cocoa plantations in Côte d'Evoir. Have those kids ever tried a chicken dinner? Add to that the destruction of acres of tropical forests for cheap palm oil and billions of tons of plastic wrappers that will
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rot for centuries. And a carefree candy bar from a kiosk is turning into one of the most cynical industries on the planet. Oh no! Bad capitalism. Bad. And I want good. Okay, let's move on.
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Who knows, maybe the new super-ethical and super-nutritious star will emerge from the category of protein bars. Or Dubai chocolate will suddenly prove more than just a passing fad. Or the entire market will be pushed aside by Mr. Beast chocolates, which aren't even
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bars, but simply chunks of chocolate. Share your thoughts in the comments. Subscribe here and there and eat less junk. Okay? เฮ
Topics:Snickershistory of candy barsMars companyMilky Waychocolate barsSoviet candyRussian confectionerycandy marketingcandy bar evolutioncandy culture
