“May I have that?” she asked to her daughter’s delight. It was rare by this point for Regehr, who was elderly and living in a nursing home, to initiate conversation due to memory loss. But that chocolate bar brought a sparkle to her eye.
It’s exactly what Crystal Westergard had been hoping for when she initially tried to find the Cuban Lunch, her mom’s favourite chocolate bar that she’d enjoyed as a child in the 1930s.
Westergard knew that the hit of chocolate might spur memories for her mom and bring some joy. But she was sad to find out that the chocolates that the Paulin Chambers Company had manufactured for decades had ceased production in the early ‘90s. She told her husband, Bert, and they discovered the trademark was available.
“So I did a bit of research and found more and more people just like me who wanted to buy this chocolate bar. I thought: Why is this thing that so many people would embrace not being done? I just couldn’t figure it out,” she says.
Westergard’s a full-time physiotherapist who owns her own clinic in Camrose. But, in 2018, she embarked on a whole other side business, Canadian Candy Nostalgia, that has now brought back three — and counting — distinct historic chocolate bars.
She quickly understood why no one had successfully brought Cuban Lunch back. It took a lot of work to find a company making those little red cups. The clear wrapper means the sun can more easily damage the product. There were also challenges with designing the wrapper and people warned her that the clear wrapper would not sell as well as a brightly coloured one. But she knew she had to maintain its authenticity.
“If I changed it, I’d be hooped. Imagine the raging grannies who would write me,” says Westergard. “That’s not what we’re about at Cuban Lunch. We’re not about the reasons why modern people pick up a chocolate bar. It’s about experiencing the past.”
The husband-wife team had no experience in chocolate making. They bought a book, took one class and, as Westergard saw patients throughout the day, she’d bring chocolates out from the back for patients to try and give feedback on. They created the recipe from memory — and it resonated with customers.
Meanwhile, her mom enjoyed many of the bars during and after the pilot stage. “She passed last winter, but I have many pictures of her tucking into Cuban Lunches and doing her due diligence,” says Westergard.
They’ve heard nostalgic stories of all kinds, including many families in her mom’s care home, where the staff started giving out the chocolates as welcome gifts. One person recalled driving into the city on a once-a-month grocery trips where the whole family would share a chocolate on the way home. Another lady went to a convent school in Saskatchewan where the Mother Superior would sell Cuban Lunches on the weekend.
“There are parts of our brain that resonate with fats, salt and sweet. Back in the day, chocolate bars were one of the few products that had those together. And you only got that part of your brain stimulated so rarely,” says Westergard. “And you experience that with your family and people who are gone now and ways of life that are gone now. And now you can share that with your grandkids. I think that unleashes something in our psyche.”
Bert loved a different chocolate — the Rum & Butter Bar. So, they looked into making those.
“We thought it would be easier the second time,” she says with a melodic, contagious laugh full of joy that only comes from having got through those initial struggles and out the other side.
They found a factory to produce the Rum & Butter bars — and it had to be a specific place with the one-shot machine that can get that special butter rum caramel into the chocolate — but produced hundreds of thousands too many all with the same expiry date. They had to liquidate 140,000 chocolate bars, and Westergard says the story went “mental-health-destroying viral.” She did interviews for many news sources and publications — including CBC French Canada and an Irish radio station.
That’s when the phone calls started — from around the world. “Millions of people on the planet think you are going to give them a candy bar. And the internet will just clip out parts of the story that they realize that everyone is interested in reading,” she says, her voice rising. “And soon the part where they’re all in Calgary locked in a food safe warehouse in pallets and boxes and can’t be given out individually gets lost.”
She’d get calls at home, at work, all the time — once from a teacher who had promised kids they would get free bars if they wrote to her; Westergard assumes it was a means of practising their penmanship. She could not oblige.
“It didn’t matter how many educational pieces I put out there,” says Westergard.
Reading comprehension be damned, we all want the chocolate. My husband walks by as I chat with Westergard and gives me a thumbs up and wink. I know what’s on his mind: Did I ask her for a case of chocolate?
But by this time, it’s all gone — big trucks with refrigerators came and loaded up over 12,000 pounds with the product going to fire stations and food banks, plus many other charitable places.
“At that point, you don’t know if you’re going to be able to keep going financially,” says Westergard. Along with liquidating the chocolate, at the time she thought she might have to liquidate the company itself. So she called her lawyer to see if they could sell.
“And he said: I can’t sell it unless you turn it around. I thought: great.”
But she did it — she sold stocks they were keeping for retirement and loaned the company money for a couple months. “Luckily, the other chocolate bars sell well and the fresh Rum & Butters were selling just fine so there was cash flow,” she says.
And now there’s even a new historic bar on the team — the Reggie! bar, endorsed by baseball legend Reggie Jackson, aka Mr. October. It’s produced in the United States. It was created in 1978 by the Curtiss Candy Co, also known for the manufacturing the Baby Ruth bar. That year, on the home-opening day at Yankee Stadium, the New York Yankees gave away thousands of the bars to fans who threw them on the field after Jackson hit a home run.
“It was such a shared experience. Forty thousand people all threw them in the air at the same time. They had to stop the game. It’s a candy bar moment in history,” Westergard says.
She loves the connection people have with all three of her company’s candy bars. They are all unique, all made in different places and all resonate with different people.
“They each have their own identity. And they each have their own website — we can’t slam them together, that would be sacrilege.”
This article appears in the Mar/Apr 2024 issue of Edify
