After mysteriously disappearing from Australian shelves over a decade ago, leaving children desperate and heartbroken, Australia’s favourite environmentally conscious chocolate characters, Yowies, are coming back.
A new company, Yowie Group Ltd, has secured the rights to the chocolates and will distribute them in the United States with plans on making a home return soon after.
For the uninitiated, the Yowie chocolates were similar in nature to the Kinder Surprise, in the the chocolate casing contained a toy inside. However,each Yowie toy was instead an animal native to either Australia or New Zealand.
They were based on characters created by best-selling authors Bryce Courtenay and Geoff Pike in the early 1990s and pitched to children as protectors of the environments. Their enemies, the Grumkins, alternatively represented the environmentally destructive actions of humans.
The Yowie chocolates were pulled from Australian shelves in the 2000s after a long-standing dispute between Cadbury and the creatures’ creators, Courtenay and Pike, over the rights to distributing the chocolates overseas.
According to the ABC, Yowies were one of Cadbury’s most successful brands ever launched, selling 65 million units in Australia in its first year alone, before making their way into the Asia-Pacific market.
The new Yowie Group Ltd holds the only patent in the US to distribute a chocolate-encased toy after the small toys inside Ferrero’s Kinder Surprise were deemed a choking hazard.
Yowie Group chairman Wayne Loxton says the chocolate is enjoying early success in the US having already secured a manufacturing contract and is currently on trial in hundreds of stores.
