Walk down any candy aisle today and you’ll find plenty of familiar wrappers. Look closer, though, and you’ll notice what’s absent. Some bars lasted only a few months, while others sat in lunchboxes for decades before they quietly vanished.
Not every goodbye is final, and that makes this list interesting. One of the seven below actually came back, while the rest are still waiting. Here’s a look at what happened to each, based on what the available sources confirm.
Marathon Bar
The Marathon Bar was hard to overlook. Mars launched the 8-inch braided caramel bar in 1973, and the wrapper even carried a ruler to show off its length. That gimmick helped make it memorable for a whole generation of kids.
Mars discontinued Marathon in 1981. It was on shelves for only about eight years. Even so, in nostalgic candy threads on social media, the Marathon Bar usually gets a mention. That’s quite a legacy for such a short run.
Butterfinger BB’s
Butterfinger BB’s took the crisp peanut butter center and chocolate coating of the classic bar and shrank it into bite-size balls. They debuted in 1992 with help from The Simpsons advertising campaign. The cartoon tie-in made them a pop culture staple of the decade.
Nestlé discontinued the BB’s in 2006, and the original version has not returned. The standard Butterfinger bar is still around, which makes the missing snack-size version feel a bit odd. Fans who grew up with the box in the movie theater aisle haven’t forgotten it.
Altoids Sours
Altoids Sours put fruit-flavored hard candy into the brand’s familiar metal tins. The original Altoids Sours were discontinued in 2010. The regular mints carried on, but the tart cousins didn’t.
Fans do have an option, of sorts. Iconic Candy now sells a recreation called Retro Sours, which is not affiliated with Altoids or Mars Wrigley. It’s a useful reminder that the original product itself is still gone.
Hershey’s S’mores Bar
On paper, a chocolate bar built around the campfire classic sounded like a sure thing. Despite this seemingly winning combo, Hershey’s S’mores ultimately didn’t stand the test of time and were discontinued in 2012. Candy bar write-ups often point to low sales and shifting consumer tastes as the usual reasons such bars go away.
The bar hasn’t been forgotten online. The candy bar still has a relatively dedicated online fanbase. Still, a quick search shows no sign of an official comeback.
Hershey’s Raspberries ‘n’ Creme Bar
This one barely had time to make an impression. This white chocolate candy bar was released and discontinued in the same year, 2006. That timeline suggests shoppers never really got the chance to fall in love with it.
Its brief life has earned it a odd kind of fame. Hershey’s Raspberries’ n’ Creme Bar is now considered one of Hershey’s shortest-lived candy bars. Short runs like this tend to fuel nostalgia, since few people ever got to try it.
PB Max
PB Max was a Mars creation from the late 1980s. It was made of creamy peanut butter over a square-shaped whole grain cookie, enrobed in milk chocolate with crunchy round cookie pieces. It sat in the same family as Snickers and Twix, though it had a style all its own.
It launched in 1989 or 1990 and was discontinued in 1994. Online discussion of discontinued candy still brings it up regularly, and it’s often described as a fan favorite. Details about why it ended vary by source, so it’s best to treat the stories with some caution.
Sky Bar
Not every disappearance is permanent, and Sky Bar proves it. The candy bar was introduced by Necco in 1938, discontinued in 2018 upon Necco’s bankruptcy, and reintroduced in 2019 by the Sky Bar Confectionery Company. Its famous four-flavor chocolate bar format survived the trip.
That revival makes it the happy ending on this list. For the others, a comeback would likely take sustained fan demand plus a company willing to bet on it. Sky Bar shows it can happen, even if it’s rare.
Looking across these seven, the reasons for disappearing vary a lot. Some had short lives, some lost out in corporate decisions, and one was brought back by a new owner. What they share is the way people still talk about them years later.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that candy is as much about memory as taste. A wrapper can be gone for decades and still get a mention in every nostalgic thread. And once in a while, like with Sky Bar, the shelf space returns.
