Past the perfume associates unholstering bottles of Chanel No. 5, and up an escalator half-hidden by fragrance displays, the staff of Macy’s Herald Square is cultivating an ecosystem of gummies. Worms, bears, pigs, and fish lay in wait in the shadow of a stand of Wonka-themed T-shirts. But the gummies aren’t selling and neither are the tees.
It’s not that people aren’t interested in the Timothee Chalamet movie, which is on track to make $35 million in its opening weekend domestically. They just have very specific expectations. They want chocolate. They want a Wonka Bar. They want a golden ticket. And they can’t have any of those things.
Chicago’s Breaker Confections launched the Wonka brand in 1976, and Nestlé acquired it in 1988, which used the brand to promote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005, launching a predictable “golden ticket” marketing campaign with cash prizes. Sales were great but dwindled. The bar was discontinued in 2010. Then, in 2013, a reboot: Nestle ran more or less the same golden ticket campaign and, again, saw high demand ($3.8 million a month in the UK) followed by a tail-off. In 2018, Nestle sold its entire confectionary business — including the Wonka name — to Ferrero and now the Rocher guys seem to have fumbled the bag. At a moment when consumers are looking for experiences as much as anything, Ferrero has opted not to produce a product with an experience, a raffle, built in. That looks like a vote of no confidence in old Timmy C., but also like a misreading of the current candy market.
Ask the Sales Associates at Macy’s and they all say the same thing: Adults are nuts for retro treats. Freeze-dried sweets. Fruit stripes. Candy cigarettes. Pez. Anything that tastes like a simpler time, when Y2K was the biggest global threat.
The same Sales Associates also say they are tired of getting asked about Wonka chocolate bars. Huge demand. Zero supply.
This is bizarre not only because there could be $4M+ in delicious money on the table (inflation, America), but because research shows that this kind of “reverse product placement” works. One 2015 study using two fictional service brands, MacLaren’s Pub from How I Met Your Mother and Central Perk from Friends, found that perceived service quality and identification with a fake brand equates to sales in the real world. It’s why Dunder Mifflin Paper is a thing, and, back to candy, why Bertie Botts Every-Flavored Beans do business even though Harry Potter is now approaching his paunchy middle age.
Wonka may not have the IP power of Harry Potter, but it’s more powerful than most would guess. The 2005 installment made half a billion dollars worldwide and last year, Mr. Beast racked up hundreds of millions of views collaborating with Gordon Ramsay on a chocolate factory death trap – a game show version of Wonka’s operation, with the winner scoring half a million dollars (obstacles included frisbee tossing giant Mentos into gargantuan bottles of soda). As it turns out, Roald Dahl’s eccentric industrialist has a bit of Barbie and a bit of Oppenheimer. The candy colors. The world-conquering scale.
Ferrero may not be chasing the opportunity, but counterfeiters are. Phony Wonka bars are cropping up everywhere. As the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) warns, those chocolates might not even be safe to eat. It happened last year too, they said, indicating that a market Wonka bar lull puts digestive systems at risk.
Ferrero’s mum on why they won’t break in their (relatively) new IP, but it’s possible that they’re feeling risk-averse given the ebbs and flows of Wonka bars on the market. Ferrero is happy to reproduce Nestle’s Crunch bars, for instance, or TicTacs, tried-and-true staples of impulse checkout line purchasing. Maybe they don’t want to deal with the complications of an ebb in their candy division, or maybe they don’t want to cannibalize their other chocolate brands (Kinder; BabyRuth; Butterfinger). When you don’t take big risks, though, you miss out on the boon of an organic pop culture moment. It keeps both manufacturing and corporate creativity on an assembly line.
