Carnation Breakfast Bars – The Retroist

When I was a kid, I tended to stay up late. I wasn’t supposed to, but once I was in my room and everyone else was sleeping, I would watch my small B&W TV or read way later than I should have. Because of this I was always running late for school. My mom thought I was just a sleepy kid and tried all sorts of things to get me up. Eventually she started to accept that I was going to maximize my morning time at home, but still wanted me to have something for breakfast before I got to school. When I couldn’t sit down to have a bowl of cereal she would insist I grab a Pop Tart or something even better, a Carnation Breakfast Bar.

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Much like with Granola Bars, I approached the Carnation Breakfast Bar with skepticism. I liked the bar part, but because my mom thought it was a good idea, I thought it must be filled with hidden vegetables or something. Boy, was I wrong. I am sure it was some sale that landed the first box of the bars in our house, but after having my first bar while walking to school that day, I knew they were going to go quickly.

Most online sources will point to 1975 as the launch year for the Breakfast Bar, but looking through old advertisements, I have found that they were being sold as early as the fall of 1973. Here you will see an advertisement from the Kansas City Star on September 9 using the word “Introducing.”

This ad shows that the bars were already in the familiar form many of us would come to love. While the bar pictured was Chocolate Chip, they also mention that they were available in four flavors, which were Chocolate Chip, Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and Frosted. An important component of their early advertisement really stressed that you needed to have a glass of milk to make it a complete meal. I usually ate them on the go, but when I did have them with milk, they really worked well together.

The obvious appeal of the bar is that it looked like a candy bar and tasted like one as well. This was not lost on concerned parents in the 1970s. The Florida newspaper, The Ledger, interviewed five people who had tried the bars in 1975. Four of the five people said they might use the bars as snacks or as a more nutritious substitute for candy. One concerned mother rejected them because they were, in her words, too much like the candy she discouraged her children from eating.

The children in this same article had a very different take. One parent said her two young children loved the bars and asked her to buy them again. Another ate the peanut variety with Coke and enjoyed them. The kids knew what was up. Carnation might be saying they were selling breakfast in a bar, but kids saw them as a chocolate covered treat.

This lines up perfectly with my memories of the bars. I never thought about them as nutritious. I looked at the bars as the candy they were and I was thrilled that Carnation had somehow hoodwinked the adults into buying them.

The bars did hit a major roadblock in 1978. The FDA recalled Carnation Breakfast Bars and Carnation Slender Diet Meal Bars after pieces of wire were found in some products. 4.3 million bars were recalled despite the FDA saying serious health consequences were considered unlikely. The recall does show that the bar flavors had changed since their first year. Flavors now were Chocolate Crunch, Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter, and Granola Breakfast Bars.

Granola Bars makes sense. They were becoming wildly popular around this time and Carnation took shots at them in advertising. A 1983 advertisement compared the nutrition in Carnation Breakfast Bars with products from Nature Valley and Quaker. They wanted people to know that their bars were more than just a sweet granola bar.

In 1985 Carnation was acquired by Nestle. The brand kept on being used and it didn’t seem to change the availability of the bar at the time. That would be the status quo for more than a decade, but then in 1997, the company began taking the bars off shelves and by late 1998, people were writing into newspapers asking where they had gone.

Nestle would release alternatives and even partially reuse the name after that, but the replacements weren’t the same. But people haven’t forgotten. They, like me, remember grabbing one on the way to school or having them as a snack at work, and they miss them. They were pretty tasty.

More than 50 years ago, Carnation tried something different with a convenience food and they were pretty successful for almost a quarter of a century. While fondly remembered, they haven’t generated the online fandom that might get them rereleased. If the Carnation Breakfast Bar were still being sold today, its nutrition would probably get a lot more scrutiny, but that does not change how well it is remembered by the people who ate them during their nearly 25 year run. For someone on the go, or a kid who would have preferred a candy bar for breakfast, they were a pretty tasty compromise.