I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving today. A long forgotten candy bar I wanted to revisit today is the Chicken Dinner candy bar made by Sperry Candy Co., of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It's only fitting that on a day when everyone is busy eating Turkey, we talk about a candy bar named the "Chicken Dinner". I'm taking this information from a great book I found on Amazon.com: 'The Chocolate Chronicles' by Ray Broekel (Paperback)
Chicken Dinner was one of the early nut-roll bars and first came out in the early 1920s. The first Chicken Dinner wrappers pictured a whole roasted chicken sitting on a dinner plate. In the years following World War I, the economy made many families feel fortunate if they had one good meal a day on the dinner table. A whole roasted chicken on a candy bar wrapper symbolized something substantial in terms of food value.
To help promote Chicken Dinner, Sperry decorated a fleet of Model-A Ford trucks with eye-catching sheet-metal bodies built to resemble chickens. Eventually, the Sperry people learned that a chicken didn't convey a candy bar image, so the bird was dropped from the wrapper. The name, however, continued.
I love the internet and Flickr, I even found an old ad for the "Chicken Dinner" candy bar.
Chicken Dinner Candy Bar photo by lemonysarah
Comments