Berry Steve - A History of Sweets in 50 Wrappers

Dessications what you need. Bounty (1951).

There was always something indefinably odd about the Bounty. It wasnt the bar itself. Tender coconut, moist with pure syrup, lavish with thick chocolate. Nothing unusual about that. Wed been here before in 1950, with Rowntrees ill-fated Cokeroon bar. Maybe its the way the Bounty featured two bars in one pack, without making a song and dance about it. Always suspicious when a chocolate bar keeps something like that to itself. And the way it did it not side by side, but in series, with a little jerry-built piece of black waxed cardboard guttering underneath to take up the inevitable slack, leading uncertain youngsters with fond memories of the rice paper on the bottoms of macaroons to try to digest the whole thing. All most irregular.

Then there were the adverts. A Taste of Paradise had been around since the mid-60s, and was fairly self-explanatory. Coconut = tropical. Dead posh, like. Fair enough. The problems began in 1977, with the Bounty hunters TV campaign, showing a weird tribe of well-groomed, lightly tanned Caucasians lounging about on a tropical island somewhere, having left civilisation behind. How could they look that good out there? Especially when they existed entirely on Bountys?

Not only that, they made the bars themselves. Somehow. We saw a coconut being deftly cleft in twain. Then a sheaf of perfectly wrapped bars floated down a limpid stream on a raft of palm leaves, for the tribes womenfolk to pick out and chew absent-mindedly under a waterfall. The intervening stages of manufacture were missing. Where were the grunts shredding the coconut? How did they get hold of the syrup? Whither the glycerol processing plant? And the guttering mystery remained. Worse still, the original flute-led musical backing from Howard The Snowman Blake now featured scene-setting lyrics. The Bow-own-tee-hee HUN-ters, are here/Theyre searching for PAR-a-dise... trilled a woman who sounded constantly worried shed chosen a falsetto too high to sustain. This explained nothing.

After 1978, this fair-trade wonder had to compete with the Rowntrees Cabana, which added caramel and chopped glac cherries to the coconut mix, testing the retentive powers of even the strongest stomach. So they made attempts to assimilate into the real world, acquiring catamarans and scuba gear and moving into the more general sun-kissed lifestyle aspirational bracket loved by lazy Martini account holders and Duran Duran. Structural improvements in wrapper engineering rendered the guttering redundant. The tremulous falsetto became a schmaltzy cover of Try a Little Tenderness. The message was: Hey, its okay! Were not strange at all any more! Nevertheless, the Bounty is still looked at askance by your average British consumer. Still, it could have been worse: in America its called Mounds.