Today I’m flying back to the heady days of the mid-1990’s to take a look at the confectionery output of the pop-culture musical phenomenon known as The Spice Girls! Make the jump to check it out.
I’m not going to lie, back in the 1990’s I was an unabashed fan of the Spice Girls. And I didn’t appreciate them ironically, I sincerely liked them. I even went to their Spice World film – in a movie theater. Which might seem surprising coming from a guy who grew up on the likes of Ozzy, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles (while later engrossing myself in Pearl Jam and Nirvana when they came onto the music scene) but it’s true.
My reasons for liking this manufactured pop group are pretty simple, I think. The Spice Girls themselves were fun and charismatic, and their songs were inevitably catchy while being peppered with messages of positivity and empowerment. They made their version of “Girl Power” a global anthem, all without taking anyone down in the process. It was feel-good, be-strong, danceable bubblegum music. And it should be obvious that I like to enjoy myself some bubblegum once in a while.
So given my appreciation for them, I decided as I was putting the final touches on today’s post that I would listen to the first two Spice Girls albums in their entirety. Even now, nearly 20 years later, the music still worked and I still enjoyed it. I felt better after listening to them than I did before. That’s something I’ll always appreciate.
While I may have not been the typical Spice Girls fan in the 1990’s, I was certainly not alone. For a good stretch they were one of the biggest acts in the world and that global craze of popularity led to sold out stadium shows as well as a flurry of licensing, which included a line of chocolate bars from Cadbury.
Cadbury released their Spice Girls Dairy Milk chocolate bars with a set of ten different wrappers in the series (two different photos for each member of the group) which were distributed in the UK in 1997-98. The same set of bars saw distribution in Canada with tweaked wrapper designs featuring bi-lingual text. Today I’ll be showing you complete sets of both the UK and Canadian releases, as well as a few other Cadbury Spice Girls confectionery tidbits I’ve gathered over the years.
[Note: The Cadbury Spice Girls chocolate bar series featured fan-friendly trivia on the inside of each wrapper which I’m including in today’s coverage. The inside info was printed in a light purple ink which was pretty tough to make out in my scans, so I took the liberty of darkening it to improve readability for today’s post.]
Here they are:
I think it’s interesting that included on the back of the UK wrappers is an invitation to visit the Spice Girls’ official website which at the time had an odd address – well, it looked odd to me: c3.vmg.co.uk/spicegirls/. The website is long-since gone but you can still see an incomplete version of it over at the Internet Archive here.
The Spice Girls bars were mini-bars similar to many of the collectible-style of bars Cadbury had been doing since the 1960’s (one of my favorites being their Cadbury Monster bars) and a striking purple foil inner wrapper kept the chocolate safe. I have a pair of wrappers with the inner foil still attached, so you can get an idea of how these might have looked:
Beyond those fun bar wrappers I also have the packaging for Cadbury’s “Spice Collection” which I believe was released exclusively in Australia and New Zealand. I think these were a riff on the classic Cadbury Selections assortments. They came in a box (which I didn’t have available today) that contained three packages of individually-wrapped candies. Each small candy was wrapped in a variety of individual Spice Girls autograph/signature wrappers. Here they are:
I believe I have a couple other Cadbury Spice Girls boxes somewhere in my archives, and when I next come across those I’ll edit them into today’s article. For now, that’s everything I’ve got on Cadbury’s Spice Girls offerings from 1997. See you next time!
Wow, thank you for scanning/posting these pictures. This post brought back some nice memories! I used to have all of those chocolate bar wrappers… I’d kept them for a few years for collection purposes during my childhood, but sadly they were thrown out eventually. I remember that I regularly bought these bars after school with my pocket money, haha.
By the way, I’m from the UK and I remember that the Spice Collection box was available here. My mum bought me a few of those while they were in stores! I used to have those autographed wrappers in my collection too. This is what I remember the box looking like:
http://www.ekmpowershop28.com/ekmps/shops/easyontheeye/images/cadbury-spice-girls-chocolates-114-p.jpg / As well as this there was a Spice Collection box with Cadbury chocolate bar products such as Wispa Gold, Crunchie etc and there was eventually an Easter egg ‘Spice Collection’ product too.
Thanks again for this trip down memory lane!
I love how washing their hair made it into the fun facts inside the wrapper!
Hi There
I have just found a full set of these chocolate bars that I purchased in around 2004, Still wrapped and with the chocolate inside and in V good condition…couldn’t find any on ebay now.
They must be worth something???
Great read by the way.
I was on production making these bars and i have an outer which i bought from our chocolate shop in 1997 they are still wrapped and have been shrink wrapped .
I have some Great Britain Cadbury wrappers and crisp bags and like chocolate roses wrappers missing. The Mel b on the second series one anybody. ?
I have a whole outer fully wrapped and shrink wrapped which i bought at our chocolate shop at the factory that i worked also i was packing these on production at Cadburys at the time so i can clarify that these are genuine seriously
That’s amazing, Stephen!