| Type | Confectionery |
|---|---|
| Owner | Mars Incorporated |
| Introduced | 1930 |
Snickers is a brand name candy bar made by Mars, Incorporated. It consists of peanut nougat topped with roasted peanuts and caramel, enrobed in milk chocolate.[1] Snickers has annual global sales of $2 billion.[2]
In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Snickers was formerly sold under the brand name Marathon until 1990.[3] More recently, Snickers Marathon branded energy bars have been sold in some markets.[4]
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In 1930, Mars introduced Snickers, named after the favorite horse of the Mars family.[5] The Snickers candy bar consists of nougat, peanuts and caramel with a chocolate coating. The bar was marketed under the name "Marathon" in the UK and Ireland until 1990, when Mars decided to align the UK product with the global Snickers name. Snickers traditionally have around 16 peanuts in each bar, and more than 99 tons of peanuts go into making over 15 million Snickers bars each day. There are also several other Snickers products such as Snickers mini, peanut butter, almond, dark, and even ice cream.[6]
A replacement for the king size Snickers bar was launched in the UK in 2004 and designed to conform to the September 2004 Food and Drink Federation (FDF) "Manifesto for Food and Health". Part of the FDF manifesto was seven pledges of action to encourage the food and drink industry to be more health conscious.[7] Reducing portion size, clearer food labels, and reduction of the levels of fat, sugar and salt were among the FDF pledges. Mars Incorporated pledged to phase out their king-size bars in 2005 and replace them with shareable bars. A Mars spokesman said: "Our king-size bars that come in one portion will be changed so they are shareable or can be consumed on more than one occasion. The name king-size will be phased out."[7]
These were eventually replaced by the "Duo", a twin bar pack. Though this change to Duos reduced the weight from 3.5 to 3.29 ounces (99 to 93 g), the price remained the same. Splitting it into two bars enables sharing or saving one bar for another time. The packaging has step-by-step picture instructions of how to open a Duo into two bars, in four easy-to-follow actions.[8] As Mars stated fulfillment of their promise, the Duo format was met with criticism by the National Obesity Forum and National Consumer Council.[9]
In July 2005, tens of thousands of Snickers and Mars Bars were removed from New South Wales store shelves due to a series of threatening letters which resulted in fears that the chocolate bars had been poisoned.[10] Mars received letters from an unidentified individual indicating that he planned to plant poisoned chocolate bars on store shelves.[10] The last letter he sent included a Snickers bar contaminated with a substance which was later identified as rat poison.[10] The letters claimed that there were seven additional chocolate bars which had been tampered with and which were for sale to the public.[10] As a precautionary measure, Mars issued a massive recall.[10] Mars said that there had been no demand for money, only complaints directed to an unidentified third party.[10]
Snickers ingredients are: milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, skimmed milk, milk powder lactose, milkfat, soy lecithin, artificial flavor), peanuts, corn syrup, sugar, skimmed milk, butter, sunflower oil partially hydrogenated soybean oil, lactose (a milk product), salt, egg whites and artificial flavor.
In the early 2000s, deep fried chocolate bars (including Snickers, and Mars bars) became popular at US state fairs, although they had been a local speciality in fish and chips shops in Scotland and England for some years[11] despite containing an estimated 440 kilocalories (1,800 kJ) per bar.[12] A normal snickers bar contains 280 kilocalories (1,200 kJ).[13]
In 2006, the UK Food Commission highlighted celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson's "Snickers pie",[14] which contained five Snickers bars among other ingredients, suggesting it was one of the unhealthiest desserts ever; one slice providing "over 1,250 kilocalories (5,200 kJ) from sugar and fat alone", more than half a day's requirement for an average adult. The pie had featured on his BBC Saturday programme some two years earlier and the chef described it as an occasional treat only.[15]
The Cheesecake Factory restaurant bakes and sells its own "Snicker's Bar Chunks and Cheesecake" which consists of its own Original Cheesecake with whole Snickers chunks baked into it. It is topped with peanuts and drizzled with chocolate sauce for the plate presentation.[16]
Others include:
In the late 1990s, Snickers ran ads which featured someone making a self-inflicted mistake, with the voice-over saying "Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers!".
One such ad had a player for a fictional American football team showing off his new tattoo of the team's logo on his back to his teammates. He then shows it to his head coach who, after complimenting the tattoo, immediately tells him that he's been traded to Miami. The player then goes to have his old team's logo replaced with the new team's logo.[19]
Some of the ads were done in conjunction with the National Football League, with whom Snickers had a sponsorship deal at the time. One memorable ad featured a member of the grounds crew at Arrowhead Stadium painting the field for an upcoming Kansas City Chiefs game in hot, late-summer weather. After finishing one of the end zones, and visibly exhausted, one of the Chiefs players walks up to him and says the field looks great, "but who are the Chefs?", showing that despite all the hard work the grounds crew accidentally omitted the "i" in Chiefs.[20]
On February 4, 2007, during Super Bowl XLI, Snickers commercials aired which resulted in complaints by gay and lesbian groups against the maker of the candy bar, Masterfoods USA of Hackettstown, New Jersey, a division of Mars, Incorporated. The commercial showed a pair of auto mechanics accidentally touching lips while sharing a Snickers bar. Realizing that they "accidentally kissed", they, in three of the four versions, "do something manly" (mostly in the form of injury, including tearing out chest hair, striking each other with a very large pipe wrench, and drinking motor oil and windshield washer fluid). In the fourth version, a third mechanic shows up and asks if there is "room for three in this Love Boat".
Complaints were lodged against Masterfoods that the ads were homophobic. Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese is quoted as saying
"This type of jeering from professional sports figures at the sight of two men kissing fuels the kind of anti-gay bullying that haunts countless gay and lesbian school children on playgrounds all across the country."[21]
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) president Neil Giuliano said "That Snickers, Mars and the NFL would promote and endorse this kind of prejudice is simply inexcusable." Masterfoods has since pulled the ads and the website.[21][22][23]
In 2006, Mr. T starred in a Snickers advert in which he rides up in an army tank and shouts abuse at a football player who appears to be faking an injury. In 2008, a European Snickers commercial in which Mr. T uses a Jeep-mounted Minigun to fire Snickers bars at a speedwalker for being a "disgrace to the man race" was pulled after complaints from a US pressure group that the advertisement was homophobic.[24] The ad originally began airing mid-2007. Mr. T's main line in the ad was "Snickers get some nuts!"
In NASCAR racing, Snickers (and the rest of the Mars affiliated brands) sponsor Kyle Busch's #18 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing. Prior to that the brand served as a primary sponsor for Ricky Rudd's #88 Robert Yates Racing Ford as well as an associate sponsor for the team's #38 car driven first by Elliott Sadler and then by David Gilliland, and an associate sponsor for the MB2 Motorsports #36 Pontiac driven by Derrike Cope, Ernie Irvan, Ken Schrader, and others. In 1990 Bobby Hillin drove for Stavola Brothers Racing in the Snickers Buick, marking the candy's first appearance as a sponsor.
In 2010, Betty White and Abe Vigoda appeared in a Snickers commercial, playing American football. The commercial was ranked by ADBOWL as the best advertisement of the year. Later that year, Snickers commercials featured singers Aretha Franklin and Liza Minnelli, and comedians Richard Lewis and Roseanne Barr A 2011 commercial featured actors Joe Pesci and Don Rickles.
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