5 Facts You Didn’t Know About Kit Kats!

As a UK brand PR agency working with everything from music to charities to new, innovative products coming to market, we are constantly looking for inspiration all around us as to what works and what doesn’t. Even the largest, most well-recognised brands can go through a process of finding their feet before they find the winning formula, as is the case with Kit Kat — even Rowntree and Nestlé needed to take a break before they nailed it! A brand PR and marketing campaign really can make all the difference!

• There’s no hyphen in Kit Kat!
• It was first made in 1935 in York, after an employee put the following in a suggestion box (sexism trigger warning) ‘a chocolate bar that a man could take to work in his pack up’. It was designed to do exactly that, give workers a quick snack during their elevenses.
• It was originally called Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp, and the later two-finger version was launched in 1936. It was renamed Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp in 1937 and just Kit Kat after the war. The Kit-Cat Club had met regularly in a tavern in Shire Lane in London, hosted by innkeeper Christopher Catling, known as ‘Kit Cat’ to his friends. Nearly 200 years later, the snappy moniker fitted with agency J Walter Thompson’s attempts to move away from the longer, more literal names used on Rowntree’s other products.
• The tagline ‘Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat’, written by the agency’s Donald Gilles, can be traced to May 1957
• Japan has developed over 200 flavour variants, from banana to soy sauce to, wait for it, European cheese! Their love for the product at least slightly being linked to the fact that the name is very similar to the phrase, “Kitto Katsu“, roughly translating as “surely win.”