This Was the First Candy Bar Ever
This world is cruel, and the pains of living in it range from dull to almost blinding. So what are you to do when a hot rod of panic fires itself, Phineas Gage-style, into your grey matter? One quick, soothing solution is a candy bar. For a few blissful moments at least, you’re not thinking about your college debt, but instead how well caramel and nougat combine.
So who exactly do we have to thank for the first modern candy bar? A chocolatier in Nashville, Tennessee, it turns out.
Now, because we’re on the internet, and the people who occupy it are largely insufferable, let’s nail down what I mean by candy bar. I’m talking about what’s specifically known as a “combination candy bar,” meaning it’s a bar with a filling of multiple delightful ingredients, like most modern bars stacked below bodega counters. Your Twix, your Milky Way, your Snickers, all of these are combination candy bars.
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Now, if you want to have an argument about whether a plain, uniform Hershey’s bar, or even one studded with almonds, is a candy bar? That’s a fight I can understand, but for this article, these are the goalposts.
The bar that broke the barrier to multiple fillings was the “Goo Goo Cluster,” a name that’s both charming and vaguely unsettling, which very much feels on par for 1912, when they were first introduced. The cluster in question was made up of a milk-chocolate coated clump of ingredients that was basically a modern Snickers bar: caramel, nougat and peanuts.
If you know the memes about a modern confection destroying the mind of a person from the past, Goo Goo Clusters basically made them a reality in 1912.
Ironically enough, it was the Standard Candy Company that invented the revolutionary treat. I’m not sure how it took that long for two people, Howell Campbell and Porter Moore, to think of “multiple tasty things in chocolate,” but they cashed in. You can still spot them in corner stores and occasional gas stations, and if you’re in Nashville, you can go by the Goo Goo Shop and Dessert Bar, a high-sugar tribute to the history of their famous cluster.
