The Story Behind Almond Joy's Iconic Slogan

If a commercial comes up on TV and it involves a candy bar and a tropical island, you can quickly guess that it's an ad for Almond Joy or Mounds. Since 2010, the coconut-filled chocolate candy brand has leaned on the island vacation theme for advertising its products, with commercials featuring the tagline "Unwrap Paradise" and more recently, "Almond Joy is Tropi-Calling." In the background of these commercials you can also hear calypso music playing, but what some people fail to realize is that it's actually to the tune of Almond Joy's original slogan and jingle.

Nowadays the jingle is instrumental, but in commercials pre-dating 2010, the lyrics "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" were also sung. In a throwback of sorts, Almond Joy and Mounds released a 2021 commercial featuring the full song, and judging by the comments on YouTube, the older slogan is much more iconic, at least among the candy brand's older fans.

Though today's Almond Joy commercials highlight palm trees, coconuts, and tropical getaways, before 2010 they had a much different feel. The commercials would usually showcase different types of "nutty" behavior, such as riding a horse backwards or flying a plane upside down. This concept was first introduced to TV in 1977, but the jingle and slogan was actually written seven years prior when Peter Paul Candy Company, the manufacturer of Almond Joy and Mounds, hired American composer Leon Carr.

When coming up with the slogan, Carr ended up settling on some clever wordplay that called attention to the main difference between the company's two candy bars — that Almond Joy was made with nuts, and Mounds was not. Singer Joey Levine provided the vocals for the jingle, and in 2003, the lyrics "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't" were inducted into the Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame for the success it brought to the company.

While the slogan "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you Don't" gave Peter Paul Candy Company an easy way to advertise both Almond Joy and Mounds in the same commercial, it also introduced Almond Joy to many consumers for the first time. Back when the company's slogan was "What a Bar for Five cents!" Mounds weren't sold alongside Almond Joy, but rather Dreams, an equally popular candy bar made with chopped almonds, coconut, and dark chocolate. (Almond Joy, by contrast, is made with milk chocolate and uses whole almonds.)

In addition to the memorable lyrics "Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't," the jingle also went on to explain that "Almond Joy's got real milk chocolate, coconut, and munchy nuts too," which wouldn't have been common knowledge at the time. However thanks to years of commercials, most consumers are now familiar with what's inside an Almond Joy. And since the brand is already well established, it seems Almond Joy ultimately decided singing the full song in commercials was no longer necessary.