Chicken Dinner

by Sperry Candy

1923 – 1962 GONE FOREVER

Gone — Pearson's acquired Sperry in 1962 and discontinued the Chicken Dinner bar, closing out a forty-year run. Nobody has attempted a revival, and a chocolate bar called Chicken Dinner would be a difficult pitch in any decade but that one.

A chocolate-covered nut roll out of Milwaukee containing no chicken of any kind, named to borrow the era's shorthand for a household doing well. It sold for forty years on the back of one of the strangest advertising campaigns the candy business has produced.

🧾 One more thingSperry sent a fleet of delivery trucks around the country built to look like chickens, backed by billboards, magazine spreads and a jingle that clucked the name in the cadence of a rooster. Pearson's bought the company in 1962 and retired the bar almost immediately — though in 2014, Time still listed it among the most influential candy bars ever made.

Filed under: Candy & Gum · the ’70s & earlier

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