The Old-School Nestlé Chocolate Bar That Was Originally Marketed Towards Men

Chocolate seems like something that should be for everyone, but the people at Nestlé don't necessarily agree. At least not all the time. Like any product, you have to advertise it to a specific audience, and when it came to the Lion bar, the chocolate giant Nestlé decided that it wanted to focus on male consumers. Was there a specific reason for that? Hard to say, but it definitely leaned into male-centric advertising in an effort to portray chocolate, caramel, wafers, and crispy bits as being as masculine as the king of the jungle.

Nestlé acquired the Lion bar from the Rowntree company, which had introduced it in the late 1970s. Back then, and up until the early 1980s, the chocolate bar was advertised with an actual lion. Commercials included a short clip of a growling, male lion stalking through grass and pouncing. It seemed appropriate given the name, though it was a little unusual to advertise chocolate that way. Lions and candy have little in common, after all.

After Nestlé took over in 1988, the company decided to head in a different direction with their advertisements. Commercials from the early to mid-1990s intercut jungle scenes of lions with men in the urban jungle of a city. These commercials featured plenty of not-so-subtle imagery of attractive women, sometimes in animal print, with a man watching them and then hungrily eating his Lion bar, drawing a parallel between a lion devouring prey and a man consuming the chocolate.

In 2004, there was a major rebrand for Lion bars, which came on the heels of several earlier launches in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe. It seemed like Nestlé could never decide how much chocolate or caramel was necessary to keep fans interested. But this change-up was the most extensive one. The bar was made lighter and the chocolate more milky, while the crispy parts were also scaled back. The reason, according to the ad agency behind the reboot, was that "lions should have a dangerous feel" and the old bar wasn't delivering. To help sell the idea, the ad agency had teams in combat gear hand out samples of the new bars.

By 2007, the campaign had seemingly failed, and there were rumblings that Nestlé would scrap the Lion bar. However, that never came to pass and Lion bars are still available today both as a chocolate bar and as a cereal in the U.K., which was criticized for having 18 times more sugar per 100 grams than health experts recommended. If you're looking to enjoy a bar yourself, you may need to find a store that handles imports or order online, as it still seems to be most widely available in Europe. On the bright side, more recent ads just focus on ingredients and not masculinity. That makes it easier for everyone to enjoy.