A Beloved Canadian Chocolate Bar Disappears From the Market. By Ian Austen

The New York Times

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 Bars are no longer on Canadian store shelves. Ian Austen/The New York Times

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.”