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ELFIE REGEHR SAW SOMETHING FAMILIAR IN HER DAUGHTER’S HAND. IT WAS A PIECE OF CHOCOLATE IN A CLEAR WRAPPER AND A DISTINCTIVE BRIGHT RED CUP.
“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 manufac- tured 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 physiothera- pist 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 experi- ence 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 reso- nate 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 stim- ulated 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 ma- chine that can get that special butter rum caramel into the chocolate — but produced hundreds of thousands too
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