Popular Sweet Treats Through the Generations

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When looking down the candy aisle, or even just the impulse-buy chocolate bars, there are a lot of sugary sweets that have come and gone over the years! So let’s go through some of the popular kinds of candy through the generations!

 

Boomers (1946-1964)

PEZ weren’t just a weird, powdery candy… they also came with a fun, often cartoonish dispenser! They became a bit of a phenomenon in the ’50s, and have stuck around ever since! I know I collected a few of them as a kid, but there are so many that have come and gone over the years!

Wax Coke Bottles were a candy that wasn’t all candy. The white wax was just a shell for the sweet liquid inside.

Ribbon Candy is something I have heard a lot of people reminisce about! A popular candy, especially around Christmas time, it was a hard, brightly coloured  candy. Be careful, though, left too long and it could be what is stuck to the bottom of the candy dish!

Charleston Chews were also pretty big when they were released around the 1930s, and you might still be able to find them on store shelves.

Hershey’s chocolate was another bar that hasn’t changed over the years, and has always been a delicious treat.

Generation X (1965-1980)

Pixy Sticks were the popular way to buy… wait, is that pure sugar?! Well, it might be a popular rumor that it’s the fastest way to get pure sugar, it was a bit more of a precursor to Fun Dip, with all kinds of delicious flavours, too.

Licorice Pipes are definitely something that wouldn’t be sold now, but were a really popular candy for the kids of the 70s! Looking just like a pipe, they were a delicious black licorice candy that even had a red sugar ball on the end to make it look like the pipe was really lit!

Pop Eyes Cigarette Candies were another popular one in the candy section that you don’t see these days. These little white sticks always tasted a little bit too chalk-like, at least for me

Wigwag Chocolate was a chocolatey, caramel-y candy bar that almost looks like a pretzal with all its curves and spaces!

Humbugs weren’t just a weird word from Charles Dickens, but also a striped hard candy that tasted like hard licorice!

Chicken Bones were another candy that, although strangely named, didn’t look anything like their namesake. Often bright pink and square, these bittersweet chocolates had a hard candy shell over top.

Millenial (1981-1996)

Warheads have to take the cake for the most sour candy I’ve ever tried. Once you got past the pucker-power of this sour candy, there was a sweet, tooth-breakingly hard candy to enjoy.

Dunkaroos were a lunchbox staple. You were one of the Cool Kids if you had this cookies-and-icing combo snack, whether you had the vanilla flavour or the super sweet chocolate.

Nerds were another sweet treat! Not just a nickname for the group of kids playing Dungeons and Dragons (a game I’ve loved playing, so I’ll gladly accept my place as a “nerd”!), but this was a delicious box of small candy pebbles in many sweet flavours!

Chupa Chups Lollipops might have come out in the 60s, but were dominating candy stores around the world in the 1990s! Here’s a fun fact: the flower-shaped logo was designed by famous artist Salvador Dali!

Generation Z (1997-2012)

Toxic Waste candy. These sour sweets were sold in small, bright barrels that looked like you really might be eating toxic candy! The sour-sweet-sour taste combo was a popular one to bring us into the 2000s!

Hubba Bubba gum took the Fruit by the Foot formula of “rolled up flat candy” and applied it to gum which could be portioned using the container, itself to cut the gum into strips. Like a lot of other kids’ gum, the flavour didn’t last too long, but it was always fun to unravel and chew!

Juicy Drop Pops were another early 2000s staple! This candy was a perfect blend of sweet and sour, not least because you could control just how sour the candy got based on how many drops of sour liquid you put on the hard stick of candy it came with!

 

Those are just some of the endless varieties of candy that Canadians have enjoyed through the decades. Did your childhood fave make the list?

 

Tie-Dye Tam