Clark Bar

by Boyer Candy

1917 – 2018 IT CAME BACK

Back — Boyer got the Clark Bar rights when NECCO's assets were carved up in 2018 and returned the bar to shelves on Valentine's Day 2020. Distribution began as a western-Pennsylvania specialty-shop affair and is still patchy, and longtime fans note the new center is less flaky than NECCO's.

Pittsburgh's chocolate-dipped brick of crumbly peanut butter crunch, invented in 1917 and generally credited as the first American combination candy bar to make it nationwide. It has died more times than most candy bars get to live, and when NECCO collapsed in 2018 it looked like the last one.

🧾 One more thingIts survival record is faintly ridiculous: Leaf announced it was ending production in 1990, Pittsburgh Food & Beverage stopped the lines in 1995, Clark Bar America shut down in 1999, and NECCO's bankruptcy halted it again in 2018. Every single time, somebody bought the recipe and the equipment and started it back up — most recently Boyer Candy of Altoona, a couple of hours east of where D.L. Clark began.

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

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