The bar and wrapper
Butterfinger is a candy bar manufactured by the Ferrara Candy Company, a subsidiary of Ferrero. The bar consists of a layered crispy peanut butter core covered in chocolate.
History[]
Butterfinger was invented by Otto Schnering in 1923. Schnering had founded the Curtiss Candy Company near Chicago, Illinois, in 1922. The company held a public contest to choose the name of this candy. In an early marketing campaign, the company dropped Butterfinger and Baby Ruth candy bars from airplanes in cities across the United States as a publicity stunt that helped increase its popularity.
The candy bar also was promoted in Baby Take a Bow, a film from 1934 featuring Shirley Temple.
In 1964, Standard Brands, Inc., purchased the Curtiss Candy Company. It then merged with Nabisco in 1981. RJR Nabisco was formed in 1985 by the merger of Nabisco Brands and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
In December 1988, RJR Nabisco was purchased by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in what was at the time, the largest leveraged buyout in history. In February 1990, Nestlé, a Swiss multinational food and beverage company, bought Baby Ruth and Butterfinger from RJR Nabisco. When measured by revenues, Nestlé is considered the largest food company in the world.
Butterfinger was withdrawn from the market in Germany in 1999, because of consumer rejection when it was one of the first products to be identified as containing genetically modified ingredients (GMOs) from corn. Butterfinger sales ended after a successful campaign by Greenpeace pushed Nestlé to remove the product from German supermarkets.
With sales in 2010 of $598 million, Butterfinger had become increasingly popular and was typically ranked as the eleventh most popular candy bar sold in the $17.68 billion United States chocolate confectionery market between 2007 and 2010.
In January 2018, Nestlé announced plans to sell over twenty of its confectionery brands of the United States (including Butterfinger) to chocolatier of Italy, Ferrero SpA, for $2.8 billion. This deal was finalized in March 2018, and the newly acquired brands were folded into the operations of the Ferrara Candy Company.
Recipe change[]
Ferrara reformulated the Butterfinger in January 2019, with labels displaying "Improved Recipe". "Better" Butterfinger, as it is identified in advertising, uses larger runner peanuts in the bar's core that are roasted at the manufacturing plant. The new bar also uses a higher percentage of cocoa and milk in the chocolate coating and cuts ingredients such as the preservative TBHQ and hydrogenated oils.
The package itself has also been upgraded to avoid spoilage.
Despite representatives of the brand claiming sales have "significantly improved with the new recipe, specifically after posting a double digit sales decline prior to the brand revamp", social media users have criticized the new recipe and consider it inferior to the previous recipe.