A candy bar that vanished from Pittsburgh shelves decades ago is making its comeback Wednesday morning, when Boyer Candy Company debuts the revived Clark Crush bar at Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop in the Strip District. The event kicks off at 9 a.m., and the first 100 customers through the door will walk away with a free bar.
The Clark Crush bar is being billed as a slight variation of the original Clark Bar, according to WTAE, whose anchor and sports director Andrew Stockey reported on the debut. Boyer says it stumbled onto the old recipe buried in its own archives while digging into the Clark Bar's history, according to the station. That discovery lines up with what Boyer found while researching the brand more broadly: as Patch reports, “we came across the original mold and formula for Clark Crush.”
Patch describes the bar as combining the familiar peanut butter and chocolate character associated with the Clark brand with a distinctive crunchy texture — a twist on the classic recipe rather than a wholesale reinvention. Boyer's own product listing calls it a piece of Clark history that had been forgotten for nearly 50 years, and notes the bar is being made in limited quantities. Per the same listing, Clark Crush will be sold through select retailers as well as directly from Boyer, the report adds.
A Pittsburgh Candy Legacy With a Tangled Timeline
The original Clark Bar's roots run deep in Pittsburgh, though accounts differ on exactly when it began. Patch's report places the bar's origin in 1886 alongside the D.L. Clark Candy Company, while Pittsburgh Magazine has written that David L. Clark created the candy bar in 1917. Either way, the crunchy chocolate-and-peanut-butter bar became a hometown staple, described by Pittsburgh Magazine as having been first confected in Pittsburgh long before it became a national name.
The bar's modern history has been rocky. It was discontinued in 2018 after more than 100 years on shelves, according to CBS News Pittsburgh, which also reported that Necco-brand candy orders jumped 50 percent and Clark Bar sales rose 35 percent once word spread the company might shut down, per Pittsburgh Magazine's reporting. Necco itself had bought the Clark Bar recipe and equipment at a bankruptcy auction back in 1999, Pittsburgh Magazine notes, before the brand eventually landed with Boyer.
Boyer's Role in Keeping Clark Alive
Altoona-based Boyer Candy Company bought the Clark Bar recipe and brought the candy back once Necco folded, CBS News Pittsburgh reported, and Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop in the Strip District was among the first spots to carry the revived bars at the time. Founded in Altoona in 1936, Boyer continues to manufacture both the Clark Bar and its longtime Mallo Cup, according to a company release distributed via prweb.com. WTAE has separately reported that the current Clark Bar is made by Altoona-based Boyer Candy Company, with production described as limited since the company took over the brand.
Now that same manufacturer is reviving one of the brand's lesser-known offshoots, giving longtime Pittsburgh candy fans a chance to try a bar many had never even heard of, let alone tasted, in half a century. Wednesday's 9 a.m. debut at Grandpa Joe's Candy Shop marks the bar's first appearance back in the city where the Clark name began.
