PB Max
Mars's turn-of-the-'90s creation: a square of whole-grain cookie topped with creamy peanut butter, enrobed in milk chocolate studded with crunchy cookie bits. It became legendary not for its sales — which were solid — but for the family politics behind its disappearance.
Mars introduced PB Max around 1990 as a departure from the company's core chocolate-bar portfolio: creamy peanut butter atop a square whole-grain cookie, the whole thing coated in milk chocolate embedded with crispy cookie pieces. The TV advertising played with the "PB" abbreviation — joking that it could stand for "portly ballerina" or "parachuting buffalo," anything but what it obviously meant.
The bar sold — $50 million worth, by the account that made it famous. Yet in 1994, Mars discontinued it. According to former Mars executive Alfred Poe, in Joël Glenn Brenner's book "The Emperors of Chocolate," the reason was personal rather than financial: the Mars family themselves disliked peanut butter, and their distaste was enough to override the commercial success. The bar vanished not because it failed in the market but because it failed the taste test of the family that owned the company — the kind of story that keeps a discontinued candy bar alive in memory for decades.
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