14 retro Canadian food and drink brands you won't find anywhere else

Tastes of childhood

For many who grew up in Canada, reaching for a pack of ketchup crisps or Hickory Sticks was a common snack-time occurrence, while chewing on gum that proudly tasted like soap was also nothing unusual. For the sweet of teeth, the treat of choice was probably a Caramilk or perhaps a Coffee Crisp. These brands might spark serious nostalgia in some, but outside of Canada, most people haven't heard of them at all. We look back through the most beloved Canadian food brands other countries probably won't know.

Click or scroll through our gallery charting the most nostalgic food brands in Canada, from youngest to oldest – how many do you recognise?

President’s Choice The Decadent

President's Choice, a line of deluxe products from Loblaw supermarkets, launched in 1984 – but it's The Decadent range, launched four years later to take store-cupboard staples to new levels, that most Canadian kids of the 1980s are most likely to remember. The chocolate chip cookies, in particular. These sizeable sweet treats were generous in size and in chocolate content, making them just the thing to pester parents to buy.

President’s Choice The Decadent

The Decadent range has now since expanded beyond cookies, and now includes chocolate cakes, chocolate cream pie and hot chocolate mix. For a brief time in 2013, The Decadent fans were even offered the chance to buy chocolate soda. Some loved the 'carbonated chocolate syrup' drink, while others found it too sweet – and it was eventually discontinued. The Decadent Chocolate Chip Cookies are still considered the best by many.

Tim Hortons Timbits

Aside from maple syrup and Canada Dry ginger ale, Tim Hortons is arguably now one of Canada's most popular food exports. The coffee shop was founded by professional hockey player Tim Horton in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario. The brand is famed for its Timbits, invented in 1976 – because why not eat the doughnut hole, too? Tim Hortons now has branches around the world, including in China, the Middle East and the UK.

Tim Hortons Timbits

You might be able to get Tim Hortons Timbits in many other countries now, but one tasty treat that's still exclusive to Canada is Timbits cereal. Launched in 2020, the crunchy, miniature versions of chocolate doughnut holes make an indulgent breakfast, if not the healthiest. And, for special occasions, there's even a Birthday Cake flavour.

Caramilk

Never suggest a Caramilk chocolate bar is just a Cadbury’s Caramel in a different wrapper. It's also not to be confused with the Australian, caramel-flavoured, white chocolate version. The Canadian Caramilk bar is milk chocolate with a caramel filling – and it is, and always has been, exclusive to Canada. Caramilk bars were created in 1968 under the British Cadbury brand, but made exclusively in Gladstone Chocolate Factory in Toronto.

Caramilk

‘Big, creamy, dreamy’ (as the tagline goes) Caramilks are worshipped by chocolate lovers in Canada. The simple wrapper has evolved over the years, and now features a lock symbol in the centre of the 'A'. The key to this is the acclaimed Caramilk Secret advertising campaign, which dates back to the 1970s and is still running today. This sweet mystery of life – how do they get the caramel into the chocolate? – has kept Canadians guessing, alluded to in award-winning commercials featuring the Mona Lisa and Kama Sutra.

Old Dutch potato crisps

Don't be confused by the name – these potato crisps are Canadian through and through. Old Dutch Foods takes its name from the windmill in Winnipeg, Manitoba that inspired its logo, and began making potato crisps in 1954, using locally sourced spuds. Though not the oldest potato chip brand in Canada, Old Dutch Foods is still fully operational and has branched out into other snack and dip products.

Old Dutch potato crisps

Old Dutch also still produces Canada's favourite flavour of potato crisps – ketchup. Ketchup crisps were invented by Hostess in the 1970s, and that special taste combination of tomatoes and sugar soon became a hit throughout the country. Old Dutch, FritoLay and British company Walkers have since brought out their own ketchup chip, but ketchup crisps remain a Canadian creation.

Québec Pure Maple Syrup

Canada is the world's biggest producer of maple syrup, with the maple leaf recognised as a symbol of quality around the world. What better to drizzle on your waffles, pancakes and anything else you fancy? Authentic Québec maple syrup is identifiable by the traditional can, depicting a snow-covered red cabin and bare-branched winter trees. The original design can be traced back to 1952, when it featured a horse-drawn sledge transporting freshly collected maple sap.

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Québec Pure Maple Syrup

The original artwork was designed by the Dominion & Grimm Company, bearing the white-on-red text above the picture, which reads Pure Maple Syrup, or Sirop D’erable Pur in French. Variations of this design have appeared over the years, but always with the snow-topped log cabin and the red-and-white labels. The brand has now been adopted by the Decacer company, founded by the Levasseur brothers in 2000 in Degelis, Québec.

St-Hubert

When it comes to Canadian comfort food, there's nothing like a warm, rich plate full of poutine to make you feel at home. The traditional Québec dish of chips laced with cheese curds and smothered in gravy became a popular snack in the 1950s. While everyone has their favourite places to go for poutine, St-Hubert Original Poutine Gravy, launched in 1965, made it easier to make it at home.

St-Hubert

St-Hubert was founded as a family rotisserie chicken restaurant in Montreal in 1951, before becoming a nationwide chain and even opening a location in Florida. The gravy came later, sold in supermarkets across Québec, and bearing the smiley face of the St-Hubert chicken on the can. The brand also has a range of ready meals.

Thrills

If you really want to taste Canadian nostalgia (with more than a hint of soap), reach for a pack of Thrills. The lurid purple chewing gum first hit shelves in the 1940s thanks to London, Ontario-based confectionery company O-Pee-Chee. Originally white and sold in a blue-and-yellow cardboard envelope, the gum was flavoured with rosewater – but the floral taste was often compared to soap. This didn’t seem to put people off, and the sweet remained popular when O-Pee-Chee was bought by Nestlé in the late 1980s.

Thrills

The gum now comes in a blister pack of 10 purple pieces and proudly declares on the packet: ‘It still tastes like soap!’ Who knows if anyone really enjoys chewing Thrills, but that soapy flavour can certainly evoke childhood memories. Perhaps the ingenious rebranding is one of the reasons it's still going strong, sparking a slew of media full of videos showing people trying Thrills for the first time and reacting to that distinct flavour.

Coffee Crisp

The Coffee Crisp is a hot contender for Canada’s favourite chocolate bar, with more than 153 million produced annually. Its origins lie in the UK, with British sweet manufacturer Rowntree's launching its Wafer Crisp in Canada as the Biscrisp. But it was the coffee-flavoured version, launched in 1938, that was truly embraced by the nation. Nestlé took over the company in 1988, moving production to the Toronto factory where the bar is still made today.

Coffee Crisp

Declared a 'Canadian gem', the chocolate-covered, layered wafer is the taste of home many Canadian ex-pats have a craving for. It's sold in some specialist shops in Australia, and can be hunted down in US stores close to the border. A petition was launched in 2000, appealing to Nestlé to make the Coffee Crisp available across America. Though victory was claimed in the US in 2006, the petition lives on as hungry Canadians seek to satisfy their sweet teeth around the globe.

Hostess Hickory Sticks

These smoky, salty stick shaped potato snacks were introduced in the 1970s by potato chip company Hostess, and soon became loved by many. As the jingle trilled: 'Cause when you've got the munchies, nothing else will do.' The words accompanied a 1980s TV ad with cute munchies monsters.

Hostess Hickory Sticks

Hostess was founded in 1935 in Ontario by Edward Snyder, who started out using his mother’s stove to bake crisps at home. The company went on to become Canada's main producer of potato crisps, with a variety of brands and flavours, until it partnered with FritoLay in 1987. The brand now only sells Hickory Sticks, introducing a salt and vinegar flavour in 2021.

Jos Louis

This tasty chocolate treat dates back to 1932, when French Canadian baker Josef-Arcade Vachon came up with the recipe at the family bakery he ran with his wife in Sainte-Marie-de-Beauce, Québec. He named the cake after his sons, Joseph and Louis. The original Jos Louis has red velvet cake, sandwiched around vanilla cream and dipped in chocolate.

Jos Louis

Vachon Inc. was bought by Canada Bread in 2015. It now sells a range of pastries and cakes, including the Ah Louis, which is a chocolate sponge topped with vanilla cream and caramel wrapped up in a chocolate shell, and a vanilla sponge version, the May West. If that all sounds too much, you might like the 1/2 Moon: a Jos Louis cut in half, minus the chocolate.

Nabob coffee

Tim Hortons might be the Canadian coffee known around the globe, but inside most Canadian kitchen cupboards you're more likely to find a tin of Nabob. Nabob Foods was founded by Robert Kelly and Frank Douglas in Vancouver in 1896. The original brass Nabob Coffee spoon, now a collectors’ item, had a figure of a man wearing a turban for the handle ('Nabob' was a term used to describe a wealthy Eastern person).

Nabob coffee

Nabob has lasted by moving with the times. By the 1980s, it was established across the country in ‘ready-brew’ instant form. The brand was taken over by Kraft in 1994, and a decade later partnered with Tassimo to produce pods for its new coffee maker. Nabob sources its beans from Columbia and has worked to make production environmentally friendly, receiving the Rainforest Alliance Certification seal and winning the Sustainable Standard Setter Award in 2012. 

Windsor Salt

No Canadian pantry is complete without a box of Windsor salt. This is a brand steeped in history, founded in 1893 when three Canadian Pacific Railway Company employees decided to go into business mining salt in Windsor, Ontario. In addition to selling pouring salt for the table, the company supplies salt for pools and roads throughout Canada. Its headquarters remain in Pointe-Claire, Québec, and mining still takes place in Nova Scotia and Windsor. Vintage advertising from 1908 declared: 'Every successful grocer in Canada sold Windsor Salt.'

Windsor Salt

The product owes at least some of its success to its iconic box design, created by graphic designer Chris Yaneff in 1962. The minimalist style, with orange and blue dots on white packaging, made it a decorative essential in any modern kitchen, and its revolutionary design meant it was ‘storable, pourable and adorable’. After 40 years, Windsor decided to give the box a makeover – but the blue dots still remain to this day.

Premium Plus

Canadians will probably remember Premium Plus crackers as the plain, salty biscuits they were given to eat as children when they weren't feeling well. Similar to a Ritz or Graham cracker, these have been a store cupboard staple in Canadian homes since 1876, launched by Christie's. William Christie, known as Mr Christie, started as a baker in Toronto, before focusing on biscuit manufacturing. 

Premium Plus

Christie's was bought by US biscuit company Nabisco in 1928, so they'll be familiar to American shoppers, too. However, while they're sold in a white box under the name Premium in the US, in Canada the box is red, and they're still called Premium Plus. Whether crumbled into meatloaf, dipped in soup or simply topped with cheese for a classic snack, there's no doubt this is the Canadian cracker of choice.

Now discover the Canadian foods the rest of the world just doesn't understand

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