The Toblerone Package You Know and Love Is About to Change
So long, iconic Matterhorn image.
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Toblerone chocolate bars are distinctive not just for their peaked shape and nougaty toothsomeness, but also for the sepia-toned image of the Matterhorn, the pyramidal Alpine mountain, on their packaging. The latter, however, is about to change.
Because Mondelez, the U.S. company that has owned the brand since 1990, is moving some of the chocolate bar’s production out of Switzerland, it has been compelled by marketing restrictions on the use of Swiss imagery to remove the iconic image of the majestic Swiss landmark from its packaging. The picture of the peak will be replaced by one of a generic Alpine mountain, the company has announced.
“The packaging redesign introduces a modernized and streamlined mountain logo that aligns with the geometric and triangular aesthetic,” a Mondelēz spokesperson tells the Aargauer Zeitung newspaper.
But that’s not the only change to the packaging of the prism-shaped, nougat-almond-and-honey-flecked chocolate bar. Henceforth, lettering on the packaging will now read “established in Switzerland,” instead of “of Switzerland,” the Guardian reports.
Swiss regulations require food products marketing themselves as “made in Switzerland” to source 80 percent of their raw ingredients from Switzerland and process them within the country as well. For dairy products, that number is 100 percent of raw ingredients — except for those that cannot be found domestically.
Toblerone (which gets its name by combining the last name of its creator, Theodor Tobler, and the European nougat treat torrone) has been produced in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, since 1908. The image of a bear hidden within the Toblerone’s soon-to-vanish Matterhorn image is a reference to the city of Bern, known as the city of bears.
In 2022, Mondelez decided to relocate some of its Toblerone production operations from Switzerland to Slovakia, where it also makes Milka chocolate bars, which were also previously made in Switzerland. The announcement of the move, anticipated to take place by the end of this year, has precipitated the packaging and labeling changes.
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