Krackel is the
bizarre,
Hershey-produced, more
crispy cousin of
Nestle Crunch bars. It basically consists of
chocolate and (very crispy)
rice.
Little miniature Krackel bars were-- are-- a heavy, heavy staple of suburban trick or treating; i guess that to the people buying candy, they seem like the path of least resistance. Look, they're cheap and have burnt red wrappers and they seem to contain chocolate and they're right there by the checkout counter! I'll just get this and not have to worry about it..
Oddly enough, at no point in my life have i ever seen a full-sized Krackel bar. Logically you would assume they existed-- all the other miniature chocolate bars had large-sized counterparts-- but i never, ever, in all my travels, in neither gas station nor supermarket nor wastebasket, have seen Krackel in any size except the trick-or-treat miniature size. There are two predominant theories as to why this is so:
- Krackel was at one time a real, full-sized product. Sometime after the miniature Krackel was introduced, the full-sized version was discontinued due to a lack of sales. The miniature version, because people were still buying it, remained on the market, a leftover artifact of another time.
- Krackel is just really shoddy. The miniature trick-or-treating version is the only one that exists because nobody would ever buy Krackel unless they were buying it for other people to eat, and the kind of person who would buy other people Krackel to eat just because it was the cheapest thing there was would not be willing to pay for full-sized bars. Ergo, the manufacture and sale of full-sized Krackel would be economically unfeasible.
Krackel is not very good, but you would greedily fight for it anyway because in the end, about half of your candy would be either miniature
Krackel or miniature
Mr. Goodbar, and
Mr. Goodbar was
much worse.