A Small Business Owner Saved This World War II-Era Chocolate Brand From Extinction

This World War II era candy bar has always had a penchant for the kind of flamboyance not usually associated with packaged sweet treats. For starters, a single candy bar had four different fillings. It also had a launch that marketing teams would drool over even today. And just when it looked like the brand was dead, it became a part of the kind of revival story a Hollywood scriptwriter came up with — saved from the brink of bankruptcy by a grandmother who ran a small business. This is the sweet story of Sky Bar and Louise Mawhinney.

The Sky Bar hit the market in 1938 with its unique offering: four candy compartments filled with caramel, vanilla, peanut, and fudge. This made it the perfect candy bar for indecisive snackers. The brand was owned by New England Confectionary Company (NECCO), one of the biggest candy manufacturers in America at the time, and they spared no cost on marketing its latest product. The announcement was made in spectacular style, with the name emblazoned across the sky in giant letters that stretched across 10 miles by a skywriting plane.

After many decades of success, the NECCO story hit a bitter note. FDA inspections of its manufacturing unit in 2018 found multiple violations, from the presence of rodents, dirty utensils, puddles of standing liquid, and heavy accumulation of residual food on non-food contact surfaces. The company filed for bankruptcy a month after receiving the FDA warning, and all its assets were put up for auction. While its other popular brands, Necco Wafers (another candy with a storied past) and Conversation Hearts, found a buyer, Sky Bar seemed destined for the confectionary graveyard.

Enter Louise Mawhinney, who owned the Duck Soup, a general store and gift shop in Sudbury, Massachusetts. Mawhinney, a grandmother to three boys under 10 years of age, had been running the Duck Soup for four years when she bought the rights to Sky Bar as the first and only bid during a Chapter 11 bankruptcy auction in 2018.

Instead of jumping into production immediately, the 62-year-old spent a couple of years finding a new factory, zeroing in on the right recipe from over the decades, upgrading the manufacturing equipment, and streamlining the entire production process. The Sky Bar's new home is right next to the general store, and shoppers walking into the store can see the candies rolling off the assembly line. 

While Mawhinney has ensured that Sky Bar is one of five New England candy bars you can still buy today, she also said she was done saving dying brands. "I wanted to make sure that Sky Bar didn't die," she told today.com. "I don't think I can rescue anything else, because I have my hands full now."

The time and effort put into getting the product absolutely perfect is paying rich dividends. Mawhinney manufactures around two million bars a year, the same number that NECCO did. And the candy bar's fans couldn't be happier. "I used to get these all the time when I was younger. I'm so glad that the company that bought them stayed completely true to what they used to be," one poster on Reddit said, a sentiment echoed by another fan. "One of the only things that has truly not changed a bit since my childhood. I love them."