Caramilk Wrapper Evolution

This to me is the classic Caramilk wrapper. Maybe it's when I started to pay attention in the late 80's.
And the whole advertising campaign they had with the Caramilk secret, even in the seventies and using the Mona Lisa and her smile....all of it quite brilliant. I love how the 'wave' graphic starts to change through the years and also you get to see the Cadbury logo change. As a personal note, I do not like the  foil wrappers that are used now as they are so much harder to open without tearing.

Chocolate Bar Certificate For A 100 Grand.

actually 100 grams
     Does this not look like a certificate or something like a stock or bond! Or the Golden Ticket from the Willy Wonka factory. The gold print and beautiful script lettering makes it look very regal and the separately stamped product batch number makes it look like it's registered and of course the gold foil wrap which starts to look like a gold bar.
     This wrapper is from around 1998, just before the 75th anniversary of Neilson's Jersey Milk in 1999 Though it was being made by Cadbury I am happy that they kept the old Neilson brand on the package and even to this day! After the 75th anniversary wrapper which was very similar to this one, they changed the package to a vertical sealed file wrap using mostly all the same design and coloring.
     What I find interesting is that really nobody, except for the graphic designers or printers, would ever have really seen the wrapper displayed in this fashion and it wasn't meant to be. I love it.

Chewey Goodness

The taste left by this very chewy caramel candy made me feel a bit different. I couldn't find any information on the candy company. I don't know if they have been around for awhile, but the wrapper looks somewhat modern, though it could be up to 12-14 years old at the same time. Maybe that's why the candy tasted strange. Or maybe it was just a foreign flavor that I was not used too. Or even just the fact that the candy idea is odd to begin with. Who would have given this candy the production go ahead?

Caramilk Secret Evolution

A NEW TASTE IN A NEW FORM

     Fry's and Cadbury's were two huge chocolate makers each with a long history before they merged in 1919. The Canadian based  Fry-Cadbury of Montreal first sold the Caramilk bar in 1968 and remains to this day as a Canadian-only item. Currently the bars are produced at one location, the company's Gladstone Chocolate Factory in Toronto.

  

 

    Last year I posted a visual evolution of the Aero chocolate bar wrapper with the main body comprised from the wrappers in my collection and with finding a few of the earliest designs on the internet. For my Caramilk evolution I have done the same, in filling out a few design gaps between this wrapper shown above and below, of what I believe to be the first wrapper, to where my run of wrappers start at 0108 00 04.

  

In 1969 Cadbury merged with Schweppes up until its demerger in 2008.

     There is a pretty big visual jump or perhaps lump in the designs with these two above and below wrappers, so it's possible that I am missing one or two, but I would not be surprised if this is it. From the time period of 1976 of the wrapper above (as shown by the Olympic symbol from the Canada Olympic games which were held in Montreal in 1976) and the obvious 1970's design motif of the wrapper below, there was not a lot of time in between these to have had multiple designs. I think its great how the pyramid shaped took on a hill-like appearance and the horizon lines took suit in that 70's vibra-tone. Kinda even looks like a geographic slice of the ground as if there is gooey lava inside. It also mirrors the profile shape of a section of the bar. Also notice the major shift back to Cadbury's older original logo design which they were using in their other chocolate bars. We will start to see this logo evolve as well! 

     Keep your eye on the swirl and look how many other changes you will find...

 

 

o108 00 04

     Between the above and below designs there were 7 other wrapper changes as shown by printing serial number at the top of the wrapper. But you can see that all those changes must have been promotion/contest offers like the one below with no real change to the actual lettering style or logo design. Even when there is an ingredient change or a change in the order of the ingredients, you will see a change in the serial number. 

o108 00 12 

o108 00 13

o108 00 14

o108 00 15

o108 00 16

o108 00 19

6-1470-178-002

6-1470-178-002

     The above design is current to date though there was a 003 design with a large key for a 250,000 dollar contest held last year, but a recently acquired bar had this 002 design.

     In February 2010 Kraft won a takeover bid to gain control of Cadbury for 18.9 billion dollars of which they had to borrow 11.5 billion.

 

Kamels

     I love caramels so much that I started to make my own. But of course this was only an excuse to make a candy wrapper for them. At first I was going to call them Nakamels.  I devised a flat long wrapper design to house a single 2 x 4 x 3/16th of an inch piece of caramel. I wrapped a few this way, but then I started to think more upscale and cryptic, ancient and Egyptian. I had already had the Kamels lettering on this first design for no particular reason except that I always come up with options while designing something and even with this first design I obviously did not decide which name to use or I just wanted to misspell caramel so that I could use the letter K from my Nak name.

     So with the name Kamels came a whole rethinking of the package. They would be individual squares of caramel which is equivelent to 2 regular pieces that you would get with Reisens or Wherthiers. I weighed a number of these squares and on average they happened to weigh about 13 grams each - a nice cryptic number. 

     Of course with the word Kamel you get the association of a camel (I'm imagining some commercials already) and also the association of the middle east or Egypt, hence the pyramid. Now this is interesting, in Egyptian metaphysics, KA is the spirit. If you look at the ingredients on my wrapper, you will see that the last ingredient is........ 

But then I often  will get the reaction, "Ewww......what is Ka?". 

    

     It's a lot of work hand cutting the caramel, the wax paper, and tin foil to size and wrapping all the pieces. Oh but the joy, the joy of giving these away to friends is immense. And they are awsome caramels or should I say Kamels™

This is a wrapper that would house 4 individual squares.

Bar Six

I have this thing for Candy and Chocolate Bar wrappers that I won't get into right now (In fact they seem important enough for me to capitalize them....hmmm), but I will confess to collecting them and whenever I have a chocolate bar I very delicately open them as to not damage the wrapper.

Almost ten years ago I was remembering a chocolate bar I used to get in the 70's called Bar Six, which was made by Cadbury and consisted of six attached fingers of chocolate covered wafers. Nobody seemed to remember this chocolate bar except me. I did not have the wrapper in my collection and I kind of wanted one. I searched the web but could not find any. I did not even find any images to curb the mystery of what it really looked like so that I could show people that this bar actually existed. So, I decided to reproduce my own from whatever recollections I had. The Image up top is the art I did at the time. The spirit is there even though I cringe now at my Adobe Illustrator skills back then, but it really worked for me at the time. 

Recently I did come across some wrappers on the web, just images, none actually for sale. So in the meantime, before that fine day of getting my very own Bar Six wrapper, I decided to make my own. Here is the made-up below (looks real don't it?), and at the bottom are 3 mock bars. Oh Yeah, now you want one!