It's the KitKat® chocolate bar's 80th anniversary on Saturday, and we're celebrating by publishing an image, for the first time in nearly 100 years, of the chocolate box that gave the bar its name. Ever wondered why KitKat® is called KitKat®? Well read on...
In September 1935 the famous four-finger wafer was launched in London and the South East under the fairly forgettable name of Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp.
Production in the Cake Department (a bar was still referred to as a ‘cake of chocolate’ in those days) at York Factory increased, and it wasn’t long before the famous biscuit line went national. It was rebranded two years later as KitKat Chocolate Crisp to fit in with the company’s new policy of branding.
The brand’s name has a longer history than the bar itself. Rowntree’s first registered the names Kit-Cat and KitKat as early as 1911, but waited until the 1920s before launching a boxed chocolate assortment with the name. Kit Kat was originally the name of a seventeenth Century literary and political club that met in the pie shop of a pastry cook called Christopher Catling; Mr Catling’s names being more easily shortened to Kit and Cat.
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