1-2-3-4 Sky Bar

The Sky Bar was never my favorite.

The caramel piece was pretty good. Peanut was okay – sort of like a Reese’s. But the vanilla was bland. And the fudge piece? Yuck. More like Ex-Lax than fudge.

Still, I had a few over time, and it was nice to have an easily sharable candy bar. Especially if you had a friend who actually liked the fudge piece. You could be generous without having it cost you anything. (Sort of like offering up the green Chuckle.)

Still, the Sky Bar was one of my remembrance of things past boo-hoos when the New England Confectionery Company closed up shop last year.

Necco Wafers were picked up by the company that makes those ghastly orange circus peanuts of all things. Talk about a marriage made in heaven! That company also took the Sweethearts candy hearts, which are fun and definitely useful as cupcake decoration for Valentine’s Day.

Other New England Confectionery confections were saved by candy companies.

But where did the Sky Bar land?

Well, in case you were wondering:

Sky Bar became the property of Louise Mawhinney, a former biotech executive originally from Scotland who runs an eclectic gourmet gift shop called Duck Soup in Sudbury, Mass. She had never made candy before, but a customer told her about the auction and she just couldn’t let Sky Bar disappear. (Source: Boston Globe)

Running a gourmet gift shop would be enough of a great second career for someone who’d been a biotech CFO. But becoming a candy maker? You go, Louise!

"I didn't realize it was my dream," she says. "The whole thing about it is it's just 100 percent fun."

Which I’m guessing wasn’t quite what she got out of being a CFO, which I can imagine would, at best, come in at 80-90 percent fun.

Anyway, Mawhinney went all in on the Sky Bar and are now figuring out how to ramp up production to accommodate a growing number of distributors.

Ramping up isn’t all that simple, especially given that the Sky Bar is pretty complex, by candy bar standards, as “segmented candy bars with different fillings are rarities.” One of the few out there has been defunct for 40 years. And:

Cadbury's limited-edition Spectacular 7, introduced in 2015, was very limited indeed. Just 50 were made, and the only way to get one was to win it on Twitter.

While Mawhinney had acquired the Sky Bar brand, she had to take a pass on the equipment, which was way old and too big to fit in her manufacturing space. So she had to invest in new equipment. Then she brought in Necco VP of R&D Jeff Green to help make sure she got things right. That including taking a look through all the old Sky Bar recipes – which Mawhinney had acquired – and picking the best. Apparently that was a formula used in the 1970s, which was well past my Sky Bar consuming days.

Interestingly, they’re using local ingredients for the fillings where they can. So Teddie Peanut Butter – that would be my peanut butter brand of choice – is used for the peanut filling, and marshmallow Fluff for the vanilla. So:

Sky Bar, the only Necco product still made in Massachusetts, is now more of a local product than ever.

Yay!

There is some concern about who the Sky Bar fan base is. Which is old geezers getting older. There was a one suggestion that might appeal to the younger folks, while also resonating okay with boomers increasingly coping with aches and pains:

Someone suggested making a CBD-infused version called the Sky High Bar, but Mawhinney nixed the idea.

She may have to rethink that one. It might bother the purists, but it sure would give the brand an overall boost.

Anyway, the writer of the Globe article did a taste test on the new and improved Sky Bar:

The chocolate is so much better than the waxy coating on the last Sky Bar I ate, which was the last Sky Bar I thought I’d ever eat. The caramel is silky smooth. It raises no alarms and merits no particular praise, which tells me it must be pretty darn close to the original, my favorite of the old Sky Bar fillings. The vanilla is sweet and lightly gritty, a little like a glaze you might make from confectioners’ sugar, only thicker. (For me it was always the weakest link, and I’m not changing my mind.) Then the peanut, which turns out to be the tour de force. I didn’t like the old version much. This new filling tastes like actual roasted peanuts. It’s excellent. And, for the finish, the fudge, which is like a squishier version of the shell that contains it.

But the new version sounds pretty good.I may have to give it a whirl. Maybe I’ll order a batch to give out on Christmas Eve.

Until then, 1-2-3-4 Sky Bar, a jingle from a TV ad from way back in the day, is at the moment pinballing around in my brain.