Full Circle

“Better than the original.”

The Little Secrets candy bar company can’t just come out and say, for example, “Hey, we made some fake Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups, only we didn’t use garbage chocolate full of like eight kinds of vegetable oil and managed to find peanut butter with very little sand in it.”

No, they have to be coy about it. Because…lawyers? We’re not sure. We’ve been forgoing lawyers and passing the savings on to you for years now, so we’re not sure about the kinds of things lawyers say.

So while Little Secrets can’t tell you that these are supposed to be Snickers bars, we’re going to go ahead and point out that, yeah, these are supposed to be Snickers bars.

Except we’re actually going to push back a little on the “better than the original” shtick.

Because while these are definitely better than the Snickers bar you’re going to pick up off the shelf at the gas station or pull out of a vending machine, we’re not sure that those things are exactly “the original” to begin with.

Like, when Jonathon Snickers was toiling away in the chocolate apothecary he built in his basement, he was probably using legitimate ingredients and lovingly pouring chocolate and caramel onto nougat and peanuts, the melty goo cascading down just like in the commercials.

Those basement Snickers bars were almost certainly delicious and wonderful. You know. The originals.

But that was before ol’ Jonathon faced the soul-sucking realities of mass production, economies of scale, and shareholders who would ultimately demand the ability to produce like a million a week at a cost of 12 cents each (give or take).

That’s when Billy Wonka shows up. He’s a capital-minded confectionary production consultant, the bastard son of an unrelated candy empire who specializes in supply chain optimization and inventory management. He drives to work in that horror boat from the Charlie Bucket movie and all his Oompa Loompas are just buttoned-down sociopaths outsourced from McKinsey. (He still makes them wear the white overalls.)

That’s how you end up with steadily more expensive candy bars with a financially optimal ratio of soy lecithin to palm oil.

Sorry, Jonathon. But do you want to be a candy purist or do you want a yacht that has a smaller yacht inside? Yeah, we thought so.

Either way, even though these are billed as being less junky alternatives to mainstream candy options, we like to think of them as getting back to the original spirit of the thing.

So don’t sue us, Mars Inc. (And don’t sue Little Secrets, either.) It’s not candy theft. It’s candy homage.