Confectionery Cousins
Last week in the Candy Classroom, we talked about coconut in candy-making – and along the way mentioned that Mounds and Bounty bars are essentially the same candy wearing different clothes, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re standing on.
That’s true, but it’s also just the tip of a very strange iceberg. The global candy industry has a long and occasionally baffling history of selling the same product under completely different names in different countries – sometimes for smart business reasons, sometimes for legal ones, and sometimes for reasons that made sense at the time and now just seem weird. If you’ve ever followed a candy recipe from a foreign source and gotten confused about an ingredient, this post might explain why.
Let’s work through the best examples, starting with the one you already know.
Mounds and Bounty – The Same Bar, Two Companies, Two Names
We covered this in the coconut post, but it’s worth going a little deeper here because the story is more interesting than a simple rename.
Mounds and Bounty aren’t just the same candy with different labels – they’re actually made by competing companies. Mounds is a Hershey’s product, an American original that dates back to 1920. Bounty is made by Mars, and it dominates the UK, Canada, and Australia. Two different manufacturers independently arrived at the same core concept – sweetened coconut filling enrobed in chocolate – and both built loyal followings in their respective markets.
There are genuine differences between them. Mounds uses dark chocolate exclusively. Bounty comes in both milk and dark chocolate versions, with the milk chocolate version being far more popular internationally. The coconut filling has slightly different textures and sweetness levels. They’re close relatives, not identical twins.
This matters if you’re making candy at home. If you find a Bounty-inspired recipe from a British source, it almost certainly means milk chocolate – that’s the dominant version internationally, even though the dark exists. Don’t assume dark just because you know Mounds that way.
Snickers and Marathon – A Name Change That Broke British Hearts
This is probably the most well-known entry on this list, so we’ll keep it brief – but it deserves a place here because it’s the cleanest example of how global branding decisions can feel like a personal affront to the people affected.
Snickers has been Snickers in the United States since 1930, named after the Mars family’s favorite horse. In the UK, the same bar was sold as Marathon for decades – a completely different name, same peanuts, nougat, caramel, and chocolate. In 1990, Mars decided to standardize the global brand and the Marathon name disappeared overnight.
British candy lovers were not pleased. There’s still genuine nostalgia for the Marathon name thirty-five years later, enough that Mars brought it back for a limited run in 2019. That’s a long time to hold a grudge over a candy bar name, which tells you something about how attached people get to this kind of thing.
The practical lesson: if you’re reading a British recipe or candy reference from before 1990, Marathon means Snickers. Now you know.
Smarties – Two Completely Different Candies, One Name
This one isn’t a rename situation – it’s something stranger. In the United States, Smarties are the chalky, slightly tart tablet candies that come in a little plastic wrapper and are a staple of Halloween trick-or-treating. They’ve been made by the Smarties Candy Company in New Jersey since 1949. If you grew up wearing your candy as jewelry – those chalky beaded bracelets – you already know the American Smarties formula. Same candy, different form factor.
In the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of the rest of the world, Smarties are Nestlé’s candy-coated chocolate pieces – bright, colorful, roughly M&M-shaped, and chocolate all the way through. They’ve been around since 1937.
These are entirely unrelated products from different companies that happen to share a name. If an American and a British person sit down together and start talking about Smarties, they are having two completely different conversations and may not realize it for an embarrassingly long time.
This one matters practically in a specific way: if you ever follow a recipe that says to crush Smarties over a dessert for a colorful topping, make sure you know which Smarties the writer had in mind. Crushed Nestlé Smarties give you a confetti of chocolate and candy shell. Crushed American Smarties give you a pile of chalk-flavored powder. Different outcomes.
Starburst and Opal Fruits – A Better Name That Got Away
Starburst were invented in the United Kingdom in 1960, and their original name was Opal Fruits. The four original flavors were strawberry, lemon, orange, and lime. When the candy crossed the Atlantic to the United States in 1967, it arrived under a temporary name – M&M’s Fruit Chewies, of all things – before eventually becoming Starburst.
The US Starburst name gradually spread back across the world, and by 1998 Mars had retired the Opal Fruits name in the UK to standardize globally. British candy fans have been quietly grieving ever since. Opal Fruits had a brief revival on UK shelves in 2008 for about twelve weeks, which was apparently just long enough to remind everyone how much they missed it.
There’s also a small but genuinely charming flavor difference worth noting: the British version traditionally included a blackcurrant flavor that Americans have never had in the standard lineup – blackcurrant being essentially invisible as a candy flavor in the US but enormously popular in the UK. One more thing lost in translation.
Milky Way, Mars, and 3 Musketeers – The Most Confusing Triangle in Candy
Settle in, because this one requires some attention.
In the United States, a Milky Way bar is nougat, caramel, and milk chocolate – and despite what you might assume, it was named after a popular malted milk drink of the era, not the galaxy. It’s been one of the most recognizable candy bars in America since 1923.
In the United Kingdom, a Mars Bar is nougat, caramel, and milk chocolate. It has been since 1932. Same recipe, different name, different company origin story – but functionally, if you want what an American calls a Milky Way, you ask a British person for a Mars Bar.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. The UK also has a Milky Way. But the British Milky Way is not the same as the American Milky Way. The British Milky Way is a lighter bar – just nougat and chocolate, no caramel. It’s smaller, airier, and noticeably less substantial.
That British Milky Way – nougat and chocolate, no caramel – is almost identical to the American 3 Musketeers bar.
So to map it out: American Milky Way equals British Mars Bar. British Milky Way equals American 3 Musketeers. The name Milky Way refers to two different candy bars depending on where you are, and neither of them is called a Mars Bar in America, even though that’s what they’d be called in Britain.
The American Mars Bar is – or was – its own separate thing entirely: nougat and almonds in chocolate, which for a period was renamed Snickers Almond before fading from the market. It had essentially nothing in common with the British Mars Bar except the name.
Why did this happen? Mars Inc. developed products on both sides of the Atlantic somewhat independently, names landed where they landed, and by the time anyone thought to standardize things the bars were too established in their respective markets to change without a revolt. So the confusion just… stayed.
The practical takeaway is real: if you’re following an international recipe that calls for a Mars Bar as an ingredient, stop and figure out which country the recipe came from before you go shopping. You might be looking for something that in your market is called a Milky Way. Or a 3 Musketeers. The candy is the same. The name is not.
The Upshot
The global candy market is a patchwork of regional launches, branding decisions made decades apart, corporate mergers, and name changes that made sense to an executive in a boardroom and approximately no sense to anyone eating the candy. For home candy-makers following international recipes, this matters more than you might think – not just as trivia, but as practical ingredient literacy.
When in doubt, look up what’s actually in the bar before you substitute. The name is just a name. The nougat, caramel, and chocolate are what count.
The Candy Classroom is where we dig into the ingredients, history, and science behind the candy you make. New posts weekly.