Massachusetts Residents Will Almost Definitely Remember This Old-School Chocolate Bar

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Chances are you miss a retro candy from your childhood. If you're from Massachusetts, you probably remember a unique candy bar with caramel, vanilla, peanut, and fudge, each in its own compartment, enrobed in milk chocolate to become one bar. That's Sky Bar, once a regional favorite, before joining the list of discontinued chocolate candies — at least temporarily.

Dating back to 1938, Sky Bar's introduction came with great fanfare: A skywriter spelled out the candy's name with "letters a mile high — written at 10,000 feet in the sky" (via Yankee Magazine). For almost a century, the New England Confectionery Company, or Necco, made Sky Bar at a plant in Revere, Massachusetts, near Boston. In 2018, Necco shut down, ending the candy bar's run, along with its other beloved candy, the Necco Wafer. In both cases, though, the disappearance was only temporary.

Sky Bar gained popularity — and kept it — because of its unique design. It's one of a very few candy bars available with multiple distinct segments featuring different fillings. "The concept alone will probably sway me into picking it up again sometime," wrote The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery, a candy blog, in 2008. "Though my inner food critic might be yawning at the purchase, my inner child and closet candy stasher would be jumping for joy."

Sky Bar returned, thanks to Louise Mawhinney, owner of Sudbury, Massachusetts, gourmet grocer Duck Soup, which carried Sky Bars when Necco made them. After Necco folded, Mawhinney took over production of the chocolate bar.

Now, the iconic yellow-and-red package is back, both in local stores and online. Shoppers at Duck Soup can actually watch Sky Bars being made next door, and despite the fact that the chocolate bar's home moved from a candy factory to a small strip-mall storefront, the output is about the same: 2 million bars a year. Mawhinney credits their assembly line, "It's a very, very high-speed, state-of-the-art, computer-driven machine that does all four centers and the top and bottom in one shot, in about a second," she told Today.

The big question: Is the new Sky Bar the same as the old one? No, but not in the way you might think. Mawhinney taste-tested various recipes and actually reverted to how the bars were made in the 1970s. Nostalgia aside, customers notice the change. "[The new recipe is] actually of much better quality than the original bar, which was more satisfying in concept than execution," wrote one reviewer on Google. "Now the chocolate and other flavors fulfill the promise!"