Remember cracking open the sweet shell and pulling out a sea cucumber, quoll or wallaby? Biology nerd Nick Evershed looks forward to starting a new collection

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Yowie chocolates are making a comeback, 10 years after they vanished from Australian shelves, according to a story on the ABC.



For those not acquainted Yowies, they’re similar to Kinder Surprise – a chocolate shell with a toy inside. But inside Yowies almost all the toys were native Australian and New Zealand animals, with occasional forays into Africa and other continents.

So you’d crack open the chocolate and pull out a sea cucumber, eastern quoll, or yellow-footed rock wallaby.

I was slightly older than the target market when Yowies were released but, as a biology nerd, I was a keen collector of the various animals, particularly when they released more obscure collections such as the Lost Kingdom series which contained Australian megafauna (Diprotodon was a favourite).

Yowies were wildly popular, apparently taking 30% of the children’s confectionery market and outselling Kinder Surprise. Created by the author Bryce Courtenay and the writer/cartoonist Geoff Pike, Yowies were removed from sale by Cadbury in 2005 after a dispute over world rights to sell the confectionery.

Yowie was developed by Kidcorp, which in 1993 entered a partnership deal with Cadbury to commercialise the brand, though Kidcorp retained the rights in other countries. Now the rights are held by Yowie Group, which aims to relaunch Yowies in the US.

The US strictly regulates chocolate-encapsulated toys, and Yowie Group is the only holder of a patent for chocolate encapsulated toys in the country.

Although the new iteration of Yowies will be targeting the US market initially, I’m pretty excited about the prospect they’ll return to Australian shops.

Every toy came with a little pamphlet describing the species, making them an excellent educational tool for kids. The range of animals was astonishingly diverse, covering birds, reptiles, marsupials and more – they produced multiple species of nudibranchs, for example.

If you want to wallow in some Yowie-related nostalgia, check out Flickr user emmoff’s series of Yowies in natural settings here.