Whatever Happened To Carnation Breakfast Bars?

If you were a kid in late 1970s to about the early 1990s, it was a wonderful time to be eating breakfast or after-school snacks. Tang was still around, but so was Juicy Juice. You might eat corn flakes, but it was also possible to gobble down Cinnamon Life cereal (or one of these discontinued cereals we'd like to see return). Or you could skip all that and grab a Carnation breakfast bar. The chocolate-covered amalgam of oats, peanut butter, and chocolate chips grabbed the attention of kids and health-conscious adults alike as a quick meal in a convenient, weirdly chewy-chalky format during the last quarter of the 20th century. It was among the first of what are now labeled "convenience breakfast" bars in the grocery store, pioneering a food category that now has numerous options. But where did these innovating bars go?

It's a little difficult to nail down an accurate history of the breakfast bar, but people have tried. The site Snack History has a pretty well-documented timeline from 1975 to the early 2000s. You can find a few commercials on YouTube. There's even an active group on Facebook called, sensibly, Carnation Breakfast Bars, that boasts over 2,000 members. Based on the collective memory of the earliest generations of grab-and-go breakfast diners, it seems that the convenience breakfast and nutrition bar scene exploded and evolved, but the Carnation breakfast bar couldn't keep up. Despite an attempt at a re-launch in 2014, by 2020 it seems parent company Nestle Carnation has shelved the concept. For now.

Sometime in 1975, Carnation launched its breakfast bar, with the slogan "an instant breakfast you can get your teeth into." Prior to that, the brand's instant breakfasts were powdered products you added water or milk to. The first of what Carnation now calls its Breakfast Essentials lineup was just powdered milk, followed by Carnation instant breakfast (a meal replacement or supplement), and a liquid diet meal called Slender. The breakfast bar was among the first products to provide the perception of nutrition in candy bar format. It launched with chocolate chip, peanut butter crunch, granola with raisins, granola cinnamon, and granola with peanut butter flavors.

It may have been an early contender, but it wasn't the first nutrition bar on the market. Proper granola bars appeared around the same time. And Tiger's Milk Bar, found in health food stores, launched in the 1960s. Today Tiger's Milk bills itself as the first nutrition bar. But Carnation's version seems to have captured a national hunger, long before Lara Bars and the not-candy Atkins chocolate peanut butter bar. Despite promoting its breakfast bar as a nutritious meal replacement, even Carnation seemed to acknowledge that may have been a bit of a stretch. In both a 1975 commercial and an introductory magazine ad (with coupon), the company mentioned that, alongside a glass of milk, the breakfast bar provides all the nutrition of a traditional egg and bacon breakfast. It's all very vague language, including the final note that the glass of milk, not the bar, "supplies substantial nutrition."

While the Carnation breakfast bar remained popular for a decade or more, it appears to have gone off market by the early 1990s, according to Snack History. A brief relaunch lasted from about 1994 to '97, followed by the aforementioned 2012 product that apparently wasn't quite the same. Overall, the bar went the way of the equally nostalgic '90s Kudos bars, disappearing from shelves.  

Today, you can find a "breakfast bar" recipe on the Carnation Breakfast Essentials website, but it consists of granola and lots of fresh fruit, rather than chocolate and unidentifiable crunchy bits. Thanks to the internet, of course, you can find copycat recipes for the 1970s original flavors.

Still hungry for the distinctive flavor of a Carnation breakfast bar? Fans on Reddit and the Carnation Breakfast Bar Facebook group have offered up a number of modern alternatives to try and sate the nostalgia. Among the top contenders, many of which are available on Amazon, are Reese's Crunchy Peanut Bar, Quaker Chewy Dipps Peanut Butter, and ZonePerfect Double Dark Chocolate (still available online, but discontinued). To which one respondent inquired with tongue firmly in cheek, "but is it dense, dry, and crumbly, almost grainy??" The best nostalgia fans understand why their product is no longer available.