Powered by its Pennsylvania roots, the Reggie Bar swings for the fences again
The Reggie Bar honors Pennsylvania native and Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson.
He earned the nickname “Mr. October” after hitting three home runs on three pitches and leading the New York Yankees to the 1977 World Series championship.
But we’ve been on a first-name basis with Reggie Jackson since he was an 18-year-old four-sport star at a high school near Philadelphia.
“Reggie’s Dad Always There,” read the headline to a 1964 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting on “Cheltenham High School’s versatile pitcher, first baseman, outfielder and team captain.”
Making his way from Montgomery County to Arizona State University, Jackson then embarked on a 21-year Hall of Fame career in the Major Leagues.
His place among the greats is secure, but a comeback is at hand for Reggie. Not the baseball player, mind you, but the candy bar bearing his name that disappeared for more than four decades.
Like the man himself, the new version of the Reggie Bar — peanuts, caramel and chocolate in an orange wrapper — hails from Pennsylvania.
‘Too stubborn to quit’
But the Reggie Bar has rallied with help from a western Canadian woman named Crystal Westergard, who has been making a habit of resurrecting old candy bars.
To get a flavor for Westergard’s personality, consider the subject line on her email after I reached out to request an interview: “Well how great would that be!” she wrote.
We spoke for a half hour; she had to get to her job as a physical therapist in Alberta. She recounted the moment when she decided to swing for the fences with an American product she’d never eaten.
North of the border, since 2018 she has revived her mother’s favorite candy, the chocolate-and-peanut Cuban Lunch, and then her husband’s best-loved Rum & Butter, a chocolate-caramel confection.
Westergard learned about the Reggie Bar in summer 2021 while watching a TV show in which contestants ate old food products.
“I said to my husband as we were watching, ‘You know, I can bring back the Reggie Bar.’ And my husband made the mistake of saying to his wife, ‘Oh, honey, that’s above your pay grade, you couldn’t do that.’ Well, never tell your wife that because then she’ll go out and do it.”
Always Reggie
A 1964 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Jackson was a four-sport star at Cheltenham High School near Philadelphia.
Westergard has business experience, having owned her physical therapy clinic for more than 20 years. Her LinkedIn profile describes her as a “physical therapist by design, food entrepreneur by fate.”
“You basically have got to know so little that you don’t know what you’re getting into,” she said. “So if you don’t know how much work goes into it, you will start things and you’re too stubborn to quit!”
She cold-called Jackson’s office and heard back a couple weeks later.
“And they took me seriously,” she said. She mailed her Canadian confectionaries to Jackson’s camp, which, coincidentally, was looking for a partner to help with the Reggie Bar’s return.
Made in Ephrata, Lancaster County
Spring 2022 found Westergard at a candy industry trade show in Chicago. She said she toured every table, asking candy makers whether they could re-create the Reggie Bar.
Jackson playing for Cheltenham High School in Montgomery County, Pa. (Photo: Jim Koenigsberger)
CY Chocolates was there, displaying a product “not completely unlike” the Reggie Bar, Westergard said. The new Reggie Bar is manufactured at CY’s factory in Ephrata for Westergard’s company, American Candy Nostalgia. (She has Canadian Candy Nostalgia for her two Canadian confections.)
“It tastes just like it did, you betcha,” Westergard said, noting that the Reggie Bar 2.0 is even better because, unlike the original, it uses real milk chocolate.
For the recipe, Westergard relied on input from Jackson and others who remembered how the original tasted. Jackson asked for tweaks to the peanuts and chocolate, while Westergard focused on the caramel.
“I wanted the caramel to be the same color as what was represented on TV screens when you see pictures of the old Reggie Bar,” she said. “I could see the color of the goo. I wanted it closer to that color of goo.”
The development time was quick, Jackson debuting the new Reggie Bar at his golf tournament in January 2023.
“Plug on America,” Westergard said, “we’ve never made a bar that fast in Canada. I think it goes to the ingenuity and what you guys have there in Pennsylvania. You really do have something going on there. You’re kind of the under-touted production area of America. That’s what we discovered in all of this.”
With baseball’s spring training upon us, and opening day not far behind, it summons to mind the Reggie Bar’s grand entrance in April 1978, at the New York Yankees’ home opener at Yankee Stadium.
Everyone in attendance received a Reggie Bar. The defending-champ Yankees limped into the game with a 1-4 road record, setting the stage for a classic Reggie moment.
With two runners on in the first inning, Jackson drove a first-pitch knuckleball over the right-center field fence, giving him four home runs on four straight swings at the stadium dating to the World Series. Kevin Baker, who was at the home opener, wrote about it 20 years later in the New York Times.
“As soon as it was out of the park, while Reggie was still making his way around the bases, the first bars began to come down,” Baker wrote. “They kept coming for the next five minutes; a rain of orange-and-blue squares, covering the grass in right and left field — while the big crowd stood and roared, and chanted, “Reggie! Reggie!”