Yorkie (chocolate bar)

Chocolate bar in the United Kingdom made by Nestlé

Yorkie is a chocolate bar made by Nestlé. It was originally made by York based company Rowntree's, hence the name.

In 1976, Eric Nicoli of Rowntree's spotted a gap in the confectionery market for a "manly" chocolate bar, and so the company launched Yorkie as a chunkier competitor to Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Production was at York and Norwich until 1994. The Yorkie bar has historically been marketed towards men. From the bar's launch until 1992, the "Yorkie bar trucker" was the famous "rough, tough star" of the brand's television adverts. Another prominent ad from this period was a billboard at York railway station with the words "Welcome to" and a picture of a half unwrapped Yorkie bar. Thus the advert read "Welcome to York". Further text beneath said "Where the men are hunky and the chocolate's chunky". In 2002, the bar's relaunch campaign made this positioning more explicit, with the addition of a wrapper tagline reading "It's not for girls! ", as well as associated £3 million television and print advertisements that featured a variety of sexist slogans. One of these campaigns provoked 97 complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency on grounds of sexism in its first year, but the ASA eventually ruled that these complaints were not justified. However, an associated promotional campaign in which free sample bars were handed out exclusively to men was banned by Liverpool's and Birmingham's councils. In 2006, a pink wrapped special edition was released as an ironic play on the "not for girls" branding, with this edition marketed towards women. In 2011, the "It's Not for Girls!" slogan was dropped,

Yorkie sponsored the Stealth roller coaster at Thorpe Park.