Snik Snak
You’ve got to be kidding me. Really. (That was my reaction when I saw this product).
Did you know the delicious Kit Kat bar, made by Hersheys, once had a rival by the Mars candy company?
Milk chocolate around 3 layers of crisp wafers, packaged in break-off sticks. Look familiar? Aside from the ridiculously similar name, product specifics, and wrapper color scheme, Snik Snak’s catch phrase was “Take a break” as opposed to Kit Kat’s “Gimmie a break.” How Mars got away with this and it stayed on shelves for , I’ll never know!
I think the warped, horrible quality of the VHS commercial here only adds to it.
Source
SheWalksSoftly 
August 28, 2014 at 9:22 pm
Now I want a Kit Kat bar. Technically food, or what’s defined as a viable consumable product, can not be copyrighted or trademarked, only the trademark name and catch phrases. Albeit a custom process of manufacturing a facsimile food product can be patented, therefore preserving a product’s competitive uniqueness. Cream filled cookie wafers (Oreo cookies) is a famous example.
August 29, 2014 at 6:10 am
Since I appear to be writing so much below that nobody is going to bother to read thru to the end, I have to first state my theory that so many popular confections seem to follow an orange and dark brown-black aesthetic that I believe harkens to our primal love of Halloween and chocolate!
Interesting that there were such blatant copies out there. Strangely, there were candies that were popular for a while, but the edition fell out of favour (I’m reminiscing about the 1990’s Reggie Bar here! Yum!) Why not rename it and give our bellies a treat again? Why, like Snik Snak, would anyone copy something when there are so many options?
I wonder if regionally Snik Snak may have hit a market Kit Kat did not have access to. I know snack cakes Drakes & Hostess do or did not really overlap certain markets. Maybe Mars had some success with a copy because they could be had in states where Hershey’s had not yet breached?
August 29, 2014 at 6:22 pm
Usually I get a kick at of looking at awful knock off names/packaging. But they are usually bargain brands, or mutually semi-exclusive by region…which I understand.
August 31, 2014 at 9:31 pm
You know, I could be wrong, but I remember Snik Snaks and I think they came out before Kit Kats. I remember the ads for snik snak and the product didn’t really take off, very short lived. When Kit Kat came along their ad had these wierd lion headed people that kind of freaked me out.
September 2, 2014 at 12:16 am
Snik Snack was FIRST? That just blew my mind.
September 2, 2014 at 12:42 am
The product’s official title of “Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp” was renamed “Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp” in 1937, the same year that ‘Kit Kat’ began to incorporate “Break” into its recognisable advertising strategy… After (WWII) the title was altered to “Kit Kat” and resumed its original milk recipe and red packaging… The Hershey Company has a licence to produce Kit Kat bars in the United States which dates from 1970, when Hershey executed a licensing agreement with Rowntree. (from wikipedia)
September 2, 2014 at 12:46 am
Retroland states “First introduced by Mars in the mid-60s, Snik Snak bars were once the primary rival of the similarly-titled Hershey concoction, the Kit Kat bar” though it would have appeared in the US ahead of the much longer lived Kit Kat. http://www.retroland.com/snik-snak/