The Kit Kat: the chocolate bar named after a club

Think suggestion boxes are a waste of time? The sale of 17 billion Kit Kats a year suggests otherwise

ON 1 AUGUST 1935, Rowntree’s of York took a punt and introduced four foil-andpaper-wrapped fingers of wafer biscuit coated in milk chocolate and bearing the descriptive but uninspiring name ‘Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp’. Yours for two pence.

The idea originated from a worker who had popped a note into the company suggestion box for a ‘snack that a man could take to work in his pack-up’. Two years later, after a rethink, the bar was renamed Kit Kat and it was on its way to exceeding all expectation, becoming Britain’s favourite snack and a global brand, currently producing over 17 billion crispy fingers a year.

Rowntree’s had trademarked the name Kit Kat (and Kit Cat) in 1911 but did not immediately use either on a product. The name has its origin in the Kit-Cat Club, an early 18th Century association of notable Whig politicians and followers who met to discuss politics in a tavern-cum-pie shop run by Christopher (‘Kit’) Cattling. Spelling of names in those days was a fairly arbitrary affair and contemporary sources give his surname as Cat, Catt or even Kat.

Legend has it that the club’s name itself derived from the proprietor’s mutton pies, known as kit-cats, which, in addition to alcohol, fuelled the evening’s debate. As a name for a pie it does tend to conjure up images of a feline-dispatching landlord in the mould of infamous barber Sweeney Todd, substituting moggies for mutton.

Be that as it may, Kit Cat finally found its way onto a chocolate box in the 1920s. Somewhat incongruously, the illustration on the lid depicted a finely attired gentleman posing outside a pie shop on which the signage reads ‘Pastry

Cook. Chris Cat. His Shoppe.’ Accompanied, hey diddle diddle, by an inn sign of a fiddleplaying cat! Not the most appetising image for a box of chocolates. Perhaps the Whigs were as keen on chocolates as they were on mutton ‘pyes’. Then, in 1933 and on the brink of bankruptcy, Rowntree’s focused its efforts on Black Magic chocolates and Kit Cat was parked, only for the brand to re-emerge in 1937 with the catchier double K.

During WW2, the Churchill government endorsed Kit Kat as a cheap and healthy source of nourishment, but a milk shortage resulted in the chocolate coating being replaced with dark chocolate. The packaging changed to blue and the ‘Chocolate Crisp’ description dropped off the pack, replaced with the promise that ‘Our standard Chocolate Crisp will be re-introduced as soon as milk is available.’ The price, incidentally, had by then risen to three pence.

Our much-loved milk-chocolate snack did not return until 1949, once again resplendent in its bright red wrapper and sporting the nowfamiliar large oval Kit Kat logo centre-face. The long-running slogan, ‘Have a Break, Have a Kit Kat’, emerged from the J Walter Thompson advertising agency in 1958.

The two-finger bar, sold in multi-packs, arrived in 1960 and the heavy duty ‘Chunky’, for serious chocoholics, in 1999. Kit Kat has been a Nestlé brand since 1988, when it bought Rowntree Mackintosh.

For half a century, part of the ritual of Kit Kat feasting was to run a thumbnail down the silver foil as a prelude to snapping off a finger, but in 2001 this simple pleasure was denied us when the paper and foil packaging was replaced by a tear-open plastic job. I almost wrote to to complain. Fortunately the twofinger bar still allows one to experience that little frisson of anticipation as you incise the silver foil before you snap.

I have never ventured beyond darkchocolate Kit Kats, but some of the flavours across the world – especially in Japan, which has had over 200 variations since 2000 – make the taste buds shrivel. How about baked potato, soy sauce, saki, cherry blossom or green tea, to name but a few?

‘THE CHURCHILL GOVERNMENT ENDORSED KIT KAT AS A CHEAP AND HEALTHY SOURCE OF NOURISHMENT’