🍫 Nanaimo Bars: Sweet Treat, Messy History, and High Prices 💸
I grew up hearing about Nanaimo Bars because my family comes from Nanoose Bay 🌊, near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. These layered chocolate, custard, and coconut squares are everywhere — especially on Granville Island, where tourists happily pay $13–$16 for just four squares 😳. But when I really look at their history, the story behind this dessert is much messier than most people realize.
🍪 A Humble Beginning
The first printed recipe resembling what we know today as a Nanaimo Bar appeared in 1952, in a cookbook by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Nanaimo Hospital 🏥. Back then, it wasn’t called a Nanaimo Bar — it was just a “Chocolate Square.” The recipe likely grew out of volunteer work, bake sales, and local fundraising efforts ❤️.
A year later, in 1953, the name “Nanaimo Bar” appeared in a Vancouver Sun column written under the pen name Edith Adams 📰. Around the same time, nearly identical recipes appeared under names like “London Fog Bar,” suggesting that the dessert was evolving through shared community efforts rather than being the creation of a single inventor.
Food historians also point to earlier recipes — for example, an unbaked chocolate cake from 1947 🍫 — that may have influenced the Nanaimo Bar. Some claims even suggest that a version of the dessert existed in Port Alberni decades earlier 🏔️, which raises questions about whether the “Nanaimo” name was originally a branding decision rather than a true origin story.
🌟 From Community Dessert to Tourism Symbol
The dessert became widely known in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to cafes and commercialization ☕🍴. Susan Mendelson’s café, The Lazy Gourmet in Vancouver, helped popularize it, and Expo ’86 solidified the Nanaimo Bar as a BC icon 🇨🇦. By 1986, the city of Nanaimo even held a contest to crown the “ultimate” Nanaimo Bar recipe 🏆, which cemented the version we recognize today.
💸 Why the Pricing Feels Twisted
Walking through Granville Island now, you’ll see artisan vendors selling 4–piece boxes for $13–$16 😳. That’s $3–$4 per bar for something that originated as a simple community bake-sale square. The high price reflects several factors:
- Tourist-heavy pricing 🧳
- Marketing the bar as a “premium BC dessert” 🌟
- Ingredient quality and cafe overhead 🏪
Yet, when you consider the dessert’s humble beginnings, the mark-up feels extreme — a far cry from the Chocolate Squares sold by volunteers in Nanaimo decades ago.
Even grocery stores sell Nanaimo Bars for much less 🛒:
- IGA: 6-pack for about $6.50
- Metro: 600g tray for $11
So the dessert exists in two worlds: one as a cheap, community-style treat, and another as a commercial, tourist-targeted delicacy.
💭 Reflections
I feel a strong connection to this dessert because of my family’s Nanoose Bay roots 🌊, but I also feel conflicted. It’s both a source of pride and a reminder of commercialization and erasure — especially when its history is simplified or sanitized for tourists.
Food carries identity, memory, and community 🍴❤️. The Nanaimo Bar, with its layered history and soaring prices, is a reminder that even simple treats can have complex stories — stories worth remembering and telling 📖✨.
