Is Seven Up (Candy Bar) Discontinued? What Happened?

Seven Up was a candy bar with a format different from most chocolate bars of its era. It was divided into seven small sections, each one holding a different filling under a milk-chocolate shell. Eating a single bar meant tasting seven different flavors.

The bar launched in the 1930s, originally made by Trudeau Candy Company, a St. Paul, Minnesota confectionery. The early Trudeau fillings included caramel, vanilla cream, maple walnut, Brazil nut caramel, apple butter jelly, chocolate pudding, and coconut cream. In 1951, Pearson’s Candy Company acquired Trudeau and took over the Seven Up bar along with the rest of the lineup.

Under Pearson’s, the fillings evolved. The lineup that most people who remember the bar associate with it included coconut, butterscotch caramel, buttercream, fudge, Brazil nut, cherry cream, and orange jelly. Other fillings that rotated through over the years included nougat, mint, and maple.

The bar sold for several more decades under Pearson’s, but by the late 1970s two problems had built up. One was the cost of making a bar with seven separate filled chambers, which was more expensive to produce than a simpler candy. The other was a trademark conflict with the company behind 7UP soda, which had been using that name since the 1920s and had legal standing on it.

Pearson’s discontinued the Seven Up bar in 1979. It was never relaunched. People who grew up eating it still remember it, and it comes up regularly on lists of candy bars people wish would come back.