The mysterious reappearance of the Reggie Bar

A few months ago, I saw something out of the corner of my eye when I stopped off at Boccato’s Groceries in Hermosa Beach, California. Something I hadn’t seen in 45 years. Something I assumed that I’d never see again.

The bright orange wrapper with bold blue lettering was exactly how I remembered it from when I was a 9-year-old with a sweet tooth in the late 1970s. And once again, I was drawn to it like a mosquito to a bug zapper. Standing in the checkout line, I put down the case of bottled water my wife had sent me to pick up and began racing through some quick math: Twenty dollars divided by $2.99 equals . . . six! I had enough for six Reggie Bars. I walked out of the store feeling like a kid again.

Of course, this is not how grown men should act. But here I was, like Jack from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” blowing the last of his family’s savings on some magic beans. Except in this case, the magic beans were delicious discs of chocolate, caramel, and roasted peanuts endorsed by a power-hitting New York Yankees legend.

As I tried to spear caramel from between my teeth with my tongue, I began to ask myself questions: Where had this delicious piece of my childhood come from? Had they been making Reggie Bars all along and I simply didn’t know it? Or had some wonderful company doing the Lord’s work brought it back? And if so, why now? I decided to do some digging. I started by calling Mr. October himself.

“This is Reggie . . .”

The voice of the 78-year-old Hall of Famer is clear and familiar. Jackson, a classic-car collector since before his days in pinstripes, says that I’ve caught him in his garage, photographing his 1966 Mercedes 300 SE AMG—valued at nearly $1.5 million (and just one of the numerous vehicles he owns)—to send to a potential buyer. So if he sounds a bit distracted, that’s why. Even so, the first thing he wants to know from me is how much I paid for my Reggie Bar. I tell him. He thinks this over, racing through some math of his own. “And what did you think?” he asks. “Did it taste like you remembered?”

It did. Back in 1977, after smashing three consecutive pitches for three clutch home runs in Game 6 of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Jackson earned the nickname Mr. October and became such a red-hot sports sensation that the Chicago-based Curtiss Candy Co. created a novelty candy bar in his honor.

Modeled after the Wayne Bun bar, first produced in 1947 by the Wayne Bun Candy Co. in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Reggie Bar had actually been born out of a boast. In 1976, while playing an unhappy season with the Baltimore Orioles, Jackson repeatedly told the press that if he ever got the chance to play on the big stage in New York City, he would become such a massive star that they would name a candy bar after him. And sure enough, he signed with the Yankees the next year, and after the 1977 World Series—the Yankees’ first title in 15 years—the Curtiss Candy Co. put the Reggie Bar into production.

Jackson’s agent had initially approached a handful of bigger, more famous confectioners, such as Hershey’s and Mars, to create a candy bar in the slugger’s image. But in the end, Curtiss, makers of the Baby Ruth (which the company always held was named after Grover Cleveland’s daughter), won the contract. Jackson signed a licensing deal with Standard Brands (which owned Curtiss until both were swallowed up by Nabisco in 1981), giving him a percentage of each unit sold.

Not all of Jackson’s teammates were fans of the Reggie Bar . . . or Reggie himself. After signing with the Yankees, Jackson told the media that he wasn’t coming to New York to be a star, he was bringing his star with him. And many in the Yankee clubhouse bristled at his outsize ego, especially when he famously referred to himself as “the straw that stirs the drink.” When the Reggie Bar came out, Yankee pitcher Catfish Hunter cracked: “When you unwrap a Reggie Bar, it tells you how good it is.”

Back then, a Reggie Bar would set you back 25 cents. But during the 1978 Yankees’ home opener against the Chicago White Sox on April 13, free Reggie Bars were handed out as a promotional giveaway to fans at the gate. In the bottom of the first, Jackson belted a home run, picking up right where he’d left off in the previous season’s World Series. The next inning, when he jogged out to his position in right field, he was showered with orange candy bars. The grounds crew had to stop the game while they cleaned up hundreds of Reggie Bars.

The Reggie Bar earned $11 million in the New York area alone in 1978, according to Jackson, who says he got the figure from Curtiss around that time. It also became a totem of the Yankee dynasty . . . albeit a short-lived one. The Reggie Bar was only available for three years before being benched and taken out of circulation in 1981—the same year that Jackson signed with the California Angels and Standard Brands was folded into Nabisco. The candy bar was briefly resurrected in 1993 by the D.L. Clark Co., which licensed the rights when Jackson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame (it came packaged with an Upper Deck baseball card, and its caramel center was replaced with peanut butter). But then Clark’s owner, the Pittsburgh Food & Beverage Co., went bankrupt. It seemed as if a chocolate-coated piece of our candy history had vanished forever.

That is, until last spring, when a couple from Canada had a crazy idea.

Crystal Westergard and her husband of 23 years, Bert Westergard, live in Camrose, Alberta. They’re not rabid baseball fans, nor do they have any ambitions to play in the big leagues with the likes of Hershey’s and Mars. They’re just two “regular people off the street,” Crystal says, who six years ago took up a strange side hustle that has now snowballed into something far bigger than they ever anticipated.

When Crystal’s mother moved into a nursing home in 2018, Crystal tried to find a certain candy bar to lift her mom’s spirits: a regional Canadian treat her mom had always loved called the Cuban Lunch—a hefty square slab of chocolate loaded with peanuts that was sold from the 1930s until 1991. The Westergards began looking into the rights and discovered that the bar’s maker, the Winnipeg-based Paulin Chambers Co., had let the trademark lapse when it stopped producing the candy. They bought the trademark online for a couple hundred dollars and began reintroducing the “new” Cuban Lunch throughout Canada under the banner of their two-person company, Canadian Candy Nostalgia. “People just loved it,” Crystal says. On the day we spoke, she had just fulfilled an order for 10,000 Cuban Lunches for Safeway supermarkets in Canada. To date, the Westergards have sold 3 million units.

They’re part of a wider trend. The confectionery business hit $48 billion in total sales in 2023, an all-time high. And the nostalgia category is a “big driver of growth,” according to Carly Schildhaus, director of public affairs and communications for the National Confectioners Association. She credits “consumers seeking out comfort throughout the COVID-19 pandemic” as kick-starting the boom. An April report by market research firm Mintel found that 76% of consumers in the U.K. are attracted to sweets that remind them of their childhood, and about the same number of confectionery customers in Canada prefer chocolate and candy brands they grew up with.

The Westergards decided to roll the dice on a second retro confection. This was another Canadian favorite called Rum & Butter—basically a booze-flavored Caramello—which happened to be Bert’s favorite. It has since sold 4 million units. Now they were on the lookout for a third defunct candy to resurrect.

Crystal, at home during the pandemic, was watching the History Channel’s The Food That Built America when a segment appeared on the Reggie Bar. She began cold-calling the office of Jackson’s charity, the Mr. October Foundation. Eventually, Jackson’s office manager called back.

“I told him that I wanted to bring back the Reggie Bar with him,” she says. Jackson, now an adviser with the Houston Astros, was intrigued enough to encourage Crystal and her husband to send a business proposal. They did. Since Curtiss, the original maker of the Reggie Bar, had been absorbed by other companies—its four-year licensing deal had expired in the early ’80s—and Jackson owned the rights to his own likeness, the Westergards were free to move forward with his sign-off. They formed a spin-off company, American Candy Nostalgia, and drew up a licensing deal giving Jackson a percentage of every bar sold. (Neither party will reveal how much.) Jackson says that some of the proceeds of the Reggie Bar go to his charity, which focuses on STEM education for underserved kids.

The Westergards hired CY Chocolates, a chocolate manufacturer in the candy belt surrounding Hershey, Pennsylvania, to start cranking out prototypes for Jackson to taste test. His only significant note was that the new Reggie Bar needed more peanuts. More peanuts were added. Still, Crystal wasn’t ready to sign off just yet. She told CY that the caramel in the Reggie Bar needed to be less brown and more honey colored, like it was in the old Reggie Bar commercials she had watched on YouTube. “It had to have that amber appearance, and it needed to have that gooey runniness,” she says. “It may not seem like a big deal, but people care. They want it to be just the way they remember.”

In February 2023, the first batch of Reggie Bars appeared on shelves at Bobb Howard’s General Store & Auto Repair in New Hyde Park, New York, a 42-year-old nostalgia candy retailer deep in the heart of Yankees territory on Long Island (although Mets fans may dispute this). With all their capital invested in producing the bars, the Westergards weren’t left with much of a marketing budget. It turns out they wouldn’t need one.

“When the Reggie Bars first came in, we had lines out the door,” says the store’s co-owner Eileen Caplin Wysel, “and requests to ship them all over the country—to Montana, Idaho, places you’d think people didn’t know who Reggie Jackson was. But there are New Yorkers everywhere.” The bars cost $2.45. “People keep saying we should charge more.”

The indelible orange wrapper soon started popping up everywhere, from Martha’s Vineyard to Aspen, in mom-and-pop candy shops and chains like It’s Sugar—roughly 2,000 locations in all. The Westergards say that they sold 160,000 units in the first year and that sales volume has continued to increase month over month. Jackson’s new team, the Astros, now sells the bars during home games at Minute Maid Park. They generally retail for anywhere between $2.39 and $4.50. But if you’re lucky enough to bump into Mr. October himself, you might get one for even less. “Reggie gives them out to people like edible calling cards,” says Crystal.

As for the man on the wrapper, when I ask Reggie what goals he has for his namesake confection this time around, he says that he’d love to see a larger rollout in October, just in time for the World Series (and, for obvious reasons, his favorite month of the year). He also hopes “that it stays on the shelf and becomes a part of the fabric of American candy bars like Three Musketeers, Hershey’s, and Snickers. If the Reggie Bar can be a household name like those, I would be thrilled.” Perhaps they’ll stock it at Yankee Stadium.

After Jackson hangs up and returns to snapping pictures of his seven-figure Mercedes, I find myself sucked into a staring contest with the last of my six Reggie Bars. It seems to be calling to me from across the decades. I’m tempted to save it, stash it somewhere safe so that if it goes away again, I’ll have a memento—something to show my sons. But before I can even taste those extra peanuts or appreciate the perfect amber hue of its caramel, it’s gone. Just another part of me, forever.