WOMAN'S DISCOVERY OF 35 YEAR OLD MARS BAR HAS PEOPLE STUNNED BY HOW MUCH CHOCOLATE BARS HAVE SHRUNK

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Woman’s Discovery of 35-Year-Old Mars Bar Has People Stunned by How Much Candy Bars Have Shrunk

By Jordan Greene  Published on August 12, 2026 05:17PM EDT

 

One woman is going viral after revealing the shocking discovery she made while cleaning out an elderly woman’s apartment.

 

In an interview with CTV News, Victoria Gordon, the owner of the British specialist cleaning company Pocket Rockets, shared how she was digging through hundreds of old boxes in the woman’s spare bedroom.

 

“Nobody had been in the bedroom for years, absolutely floor to ceiling with boxes and bags, and it took us two days to clear the whole room,” Gordon told the outlet in a video interview.

 

As Gordon worked her way through the boxes, however, she came across something that immediately caught her eye: a Mars Bar from 1991.

 

“As I lifted it out of the box, it was literally the size of my hand,” she said. “It was enormous.”

 

Intrigued by the unexpected find, Gordon later posted a clip of the vintage candy bar on TikTok, captioning the video, “Wow look at the size of this 35 year old Mars Bar!” She initially threw the candy bar away after sharing the video, but eventually decided to retrieve it from the trash.

 

The post quickly took off, amassing more than one million views and 1,600 comments, with many viewers struck by the apparent size difference between the vintage candy bar and a current one. According to the outlet, the old Mars Bar weighed 62.5 grams, while a current bar weighs 40 grams.

 

“They’ve taken so much away from us!” one user commented.

 

“THAT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!” another wrote.

 

Someone else chimed in, “I remember back in the day it was almost impossible to eat an entire Mars bar.”

 

For Gordon, the comparison also underscored a broader issue she has noticed over the years: the rising cost of everyday goods.

 

“(The) price of everything’s increasing all the time. We’re getting squeezed and squeezed more,” Gordon said. “(The) cost of living is going up.”

 

As the conversation around the candy bar continued online, Gordon decided to give her followers an even closer look. She returned to TikTok with a second video comparing the vintage Mars Bar with a current one side-by-side.

 

“But even I was surprised about the size difference,” Gordon said. “I knew that they were getting smaller and smaller, but I don’t think, until I saw them side by side, I realized just quite how much difference it was.”

 

The viral comparison also prompted questions about why the Mars Bar has gotten smaller over the years. CTVNews.ca reached out to Mars Inc., the U.S. manufacturer of Mars, Snickers, Skittles and Twix, to learn more about the changes to the candy bar’s size.

 

“Like many food manufacturers, we continue to navigate unprecedented cost pressures across our operations and global supply chains,” Mars Inc. told the outlet in an email, adding that the chocolate bar’s recipe remains “completely unchanged.”

 

“Over the last 35 years, we have made a number of updates to our bar sizes and pack formats to reflect consumer demand, alongside considering wider external factors, such as manufacturing costs and the price of cocoa,” the company added.

AH: The chocolate ration has been increased.