Summit Candy Bar

The Summit Candy Bar was made by Mars in the late 70s and early 80s. This was one of the shortest-lived candy bars that were ever sold by the company, and attempts to make it more appealing did not work well enough to save the Summit Bar. There are very few people these days who will remember this candy bar and its short lifespan.

There is not much of a chance that this candy bar will be resurrected like some of the other snack products that companies have brought back from the grave. If you didn’t know that this candy bar ever existed, here is your chance to learn more about it!

History

The Summit Candy Bar was first sold in the late 1970s. Mars first sold this candy bar as a single candy bar with a thick wafer and peanut center. After lackluster sales impacted the product, Mars changed course entirely and started to market the candy bars to be made specifically with more chocolate. There were also two bars to a pack after the change of design, which was a relatively new idea at this time. This candy bar was a lot like a TWIX bar in some ways, and many people liked the wafer center and said it tasted great.

There were issues right from the start, however. Apparently, the candy bars melted very easily, and they were often a big, melted mess when you unwrapped them to eat them. When frozen, they were too tough to eat. Some people also didn’t like that they included peanuts in the wafery center.

The Summit candy bar was marketed at teens and young adults in most of the commercials. The main tagline of the Summit Candy Bar commercials was, “Homework, homework, give me a break!” Some commercials also used the more generic tagline, “Need a break, have a Summit candy bar!”

When the Summit Bar didn’t take off like Mars had expected, they decided to try and change things up. They made the candy bars longer and thinner and indicated again that they offered more chocolate than other candy bars. Consumers immediately were not in love with the changes that had been made. The center of the candy bar is often the biggest attraction with these kinds of candy bars. No one is usually looking for more chocolate in a candy bar that has a unique candy center.

After all, if you want to have a chocolate candy bar without any other trimmings, there are many candy bar products that are solid candy without a unique central core. Mars miscalculated the popularity of chocolate all by itself and also probably didn’t give their consumer base much credit. People who had liked the Summit Bar when it offered the normal ratio of chocolate to center wafers immediately recognized that they were just getting less of what they liked. 

This change didn’t help with the melting issues either, apparently, so there was really no benefit to the changes that were made when Mars tried to bring the Summit Bar back to life. These kinds of missteps are always a little confusing to those who love a specific candy. If you loved Summit Candy Bars and were buying them whenever you got a chance, you probably wondered why on earth they would make them less flavorful and smaller.

The bottom line is always the aspect that leads to these changes, but sometimes candy companies also expect a specific product to be a bigger hit than it is right from the start. Companies often have a specific vision that they have in mind for a product, and early testing is often the basis for their expectations for a product. Add to that considerations about the cost of making candy bars with specialty fillings in them, and you have a recipe for a failed product in many cases.

For those who loved the Summit Candy Bar and wanted it to be around for good, it is even more frustrating that the product was sold for such a short period of time. There are not enough people to band together to try and bring this candy bar back, and changes in ownership of Mars products would likely make it impossible for anyone to sell the Summit Candy Bar again without making major changes. Beyond all of that, no candy company today is going to want to hassle with a candy bar that melts too easily to be kept on shelves in stores.

If you want to try a Summit Candy Bar, you are unlike to succeed. The product has been off the market for so long now that any Summit Bar that you buy will likely be entirely unfit to be eaten.

Thankfully for those who really liked the Summit Candy Bar, there are lots of other candy products on the market today that are fairly equivalent. You can count on products like Twix to offer you a very similar experience, and there are many wafer-style candy bars like Butterfinger if you were a big fan of the wafer center of this brand of candy bar. If you want to try a Summit Candy Bar, you are unlike to succeed. The product has been off the market for so long now that any Summit Bar that you buy will likely be entirely unfit to be eaten. 

Best of all, these more familiar products won’t be melted from the moment that you pick them up off the shelf, and they will survive being carried in a backpack or bag for a few hours before being eaten. There are lots of reasons that the Summit Candy Bar was a flop, and being a melty mess is a big no-no for any chocolate brand these days. 

Ingredients

• Milk Chocolate
• Flour
• Dextrose
• Palm oil
• Hazelnut paste
• Milk, sugar
• Skim milk
• Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (soybean, and/or cottonseed)
• Salt
• Egg whites
• Maltodextrin
• Lecithin
• Baking soda
• TBHD and citric acid (to maintain freshness)
• Natural flavor (milk chocolate contains sugar, milk cocoa butter, chocolate lecithin, natural and artificial flavors, and salt)

What Did Summit Candy Bars Taste Like?

When you do a little research into what this candy bar tasted like, you will get very mixed reviews. Some people rave about it can claim it was just as good as a Twix or that it was more like a Butterfinger Bar. However, there are many people who were nonplussed by the Summit Candy Bar. 

Some reviewers claimed that the Summit Candy Bar just reminded them of candy without anything specific enough to recommend it specifically. There are bloggers who have indicated that eating a Summit Bar was a lot like meeting someone you thought you might know but not being sure enough to be willing to go up and say hello.

The Summit Bar seems to have just missed the mark for being original, and certainly it did not capture the attention of a wide range of consumers the way that Mars had hoped that it would. It is really interesting looking into the reviews of a product that is long out of production. Some candy products that didn’t survive company mergers or other kinds of changes to the candy industry seemed to have been very popular and much beloved.

The Summit Bar, however, seems to have left many people feeling almost nothing at all, which is rare for a candy product. This is a candy bar with a taste profile that apparently resonated very strongly with some people and hardly at all with many others. This is perhaps the most unique feature of the Summit Candy Bar, and it is best known these days for being hard to describe and even harder to remember. 

Livery

The Summit Bar was not around for very long. This means that the livery did not change much over the short amount of time that the bar was being sold. Most of the products had a grey background with a light orange and dark orange stripe. The logo was brown and quite large. Many of the wrappers stated that the product was, “Real American Value” as well. 

In the 70s, the very first product packaging was yellow or orange. The logo was still brown, but the Ms were made to look like mountains. The dot over the letter I was made to look like the sun. This was probably the more memorable of the livery styles for the brand, and many people remember this design style above all of the others.

When the brand was “re-launched” with the two-pack design, the old style of logo came back around. There were some cookie bar products that were made later on to copy the original Summit design, but these are not actual Summit bars. You might be able to find these knock-offs that look a lot like Summit bars online from time to time, but it’s hard to say what kind of candy or cookie product you will be getting. A quick search for the Summit Candy Bar will reveal a lot of knock-off products that look like Summit Bars. 

Logo

Pictures

Ads:

Summit candy bar commercial from the 80s:

An even earlier ad for this candy bar:

Another 70’s ad: