20 Classic Candies That Had America Hooked

In 1921, Chicago candy maker Otto Schnering renamed his Curtiss Candy Company’s “Kandy Kake” bar to “Baby Ruth.” As Babe Ruth became baseball’s greatest star, shoppers assumed he’d endorsed the confection. In 1926, when Ruth attempted to market his own product, “Babe Ruth’s Home Run Bar,” Curtiss took him to court. The company argued that the bar actually honored President Grover Cleveland’s late daughter, Ruth Cleveland. Historians consider this claim a cover story. The federal courts ruled for Curtiss in 1931. Babe Ruth never had a candy bar named after him.

Solid chocolate was an expensive imported treat that very few American families could afford before 1900. Caramel-making confectioner Milton Hershey built a factory in Derry Township, Pa., where he could produce a steady supply of solid chocolate from his own fresh condensed-milk process. The arrival of the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar in November 1900 at just 5 cents per bar meant that everyday workers could now afford chocolate they could actually taste. While it was Swiss confectioners who created milk chocolate decades earlier, Hershey’s achievement was making it accessible to average consumers.

Forrest Mars Sr., one of the Mars candy dynasty, is said to have invented M&M’s after observing that during the Spanish Civil War, soldiers had begun eating small pellets of chocolate coated in a hard candy-like sugar shell. The shell didn’t melt under high temperatures. In 1941, Mars and his business partner Bruce Murrie patented M&M’s (for Mars and Murrie). The War Department purchased all production during World War II to be used as rations for the army, many years before the famous “melts in your mouth, not in your hand” slogan was introduced in 1954.

By company lore, Tootsie Roll was created by a single inventor at his Brooklyn candy shop back in 1896, but the true story begins with Leo Hirschfield, who invented the chewy, heat-resistant candy while working for the Manhattan confectionery firm Stern & Saalberg. He applied for a patent on the chewy texture in 1907, which was granted the following year. Tootsie Roll started selling individually wrapped “Chocolate Tootsie Rolls” in 1909, naming the product after Hirschfield’s daughter Clara, whom everyone called Tootsie. Because they stood up to the heat, the U.S. military eventually included Tootsie Rolls in World War II field rations.

In 1930, Frank and Ethel Mars, owners of the Mars candy company in Chicago, introduced Snickers for a nickel. It was composed of peanut butter nougat, caramel, whole peanuts, and milk chocolate, a cheap, calorie-dense product during the Great Depression. The chocolate bar was named after Snickers, the favorite horse of the Mars family, which had passed away a short time before the candy bar was created. Snickers is now the world’s best-selling candy bar. In the UK, it was marketed as “Marathon” until 1990.

In 1923, Otto Schnering’s Curtiss Candy Company, the Chicago confectioners behind Baby Ruth, launched Butterfinger. It consisted of a crunchy, peanut-buttery toffee center, covered in milk chocolate. The company chose the name from a public contest; “butterfingers” was slang for a player on a team who could never catch the ball. In order to get his new candy across the country, Schnering had airplanes drop the bars from the sky with tiny parachutes attached. They landed in 40 states.

Candy corn wasn’t originally meant as a Halloween treat. It was invented by George Renninger, a candymaker at Philadelphia’s Wunderle Candy Company, during the 1880s, and was designed as a way to target farm families in rural areas. In 1898, the Goelitz Confectionery Company (which today is better known as Jelly Belly) began manufacturing the tri-color kernels en masse and sold them as “Chicken Feed” with a package illustration of a rooster and the slogan “Something worth crowing for.” The candy remained a staple of autumn harvest celebrations for years and decades, only becoming associated with Halloween in the 1950s.

Before H.B. Reese went into business on his own, he had been running a dairy farm for chocolate bar kingpin Milton Hershey of Pennsylvania. But when Reese branched off to create his own candy business out of his basement, he decided to focus on chocolate-covered peanut butter candies. In 1928, Reese introduced his Peanut Butter Cups, roasted peanut butter centers covered in Hershey’s milk chocolate. In the middle of World War II, during severe sugar shortages, Reese decided to discontinue every other candy he made, except the Peanut Butter Cup. And that gamble paid off.

Donley Cross, a former stage actor who specialized in Shakespeare, and his business partner Charlie Fox were operating the Fox-Cross Candy Company in Cambridge, Mass., when they introduced the Charleston Chew in October 1922. The candy was a chewy vanilla nougat covered with milk chocolate, named for the dance craze of the time. Fast-forward to 1957, and then-owner Nathan Sloane put out another idea for promotion: freeze the bar, break it on a hard surface, and eat the broken pieces. It became known as the “Charleston Chew crack.”

Rowntree’s is a British chocolate company based in York, England, that released the first four-finger wafer bar as “Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp” in September 1935. It became “Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp” two years later. The story goes that the concept was born when one of the workers put a note in the suggestion box asking if they could make a snack bar that would fit easily into a man’s lunch tin. With milk shortages during World War II, the brand temporarily used dark chocolate and blue wrappers. After the war, milk chocolate and red packaging returned.

David L. Clark, an Irish immigrant who began his career as a peddler of candy from a horse-drawn cart in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, was behind the creation of the D.L. Clark Company in Pittsburgh and the Clark Bar in 1917. The Clark Bar had a crispy peanut butter and caramel center, coated in milk chocolate. This firm bar traveled well. The United States government ordered them in bulk for delivery to the trenches in World War I. Soldiers who returned home helped create instant nationwide demand for Clark Bars.

In 1927, Austrian businessman Eduard Haas III invented PEZ, a compressed peppermint tablet designed for adult smokers looking to give up the habit, in Vienna. The name comes from Pfefferminz, the German for peppermint. A couple of decades later, a spring-loaded dispenser shaped like a pocket lighter was added, and PEZ made its way to America to little fanfare. The brand soon switched focus to kids, adding fruit flavors and, by 1955, its first 3D character heads, Santa Claus and Popeye.

Brothers Bayard and Everett Heath created a milk chocolate English butter toffee bar in 1928 from their family’s shop in Robinson, Ill. Since their father owned a dairy farm, they started by having the milkmen deliver Heath bars along with milk to their customers’ doors. This gave them a local following for many years before Heath Bars began being sold nationally. When the U.S. Army ordered many Heath Bars in 1942, the Heath became a military ration.

In January 1949, English immigrant Edward Dee came to New Jersey and started the company Ce De Candy to manufacture tart, chalky rolls. He purchased tablet-making machines that had been used during World War II to compress gunpowder and ammunition materials and tweaked them to create the candy rolls, which he called Smarties because he thought the name might motivate kids to learn. The candy was inexpensive, virtually unbreakable, and wouldn’t melt. In just a few years, Smarties candy rolls were showing up in American trick-or-treat bags.

In 1928, Chicago’s F. Hoffman & Company set out to produce perfectly spherical chocolate-covered caramels. But due to manufacturing issues, the soft caramel fillings kept getting crushed by the machinery. Workers began calling the flattened candies “duds,” and rather than throw away these imperfect candies, company owner Edwin Holloway branded the lumpy, off-kilter confections Milk Duds, named after both their milky caramel center and their lopsided appearance. Packaged in bright yellow boxes, Milk Duds became one of the top-selling concessions sold at movie theaters from the 1930s to the 1950s.

In 1932, Mars introduced 3 Musketeers as a 5-cent candy bar that could be split among friends during the Great Depression. At first, the candy came with three small pieces of nougat: one chocolate, one vanilla, and one strawberry, hence the “three.” But by 1945, the cost of manufacturing all three flavors of candy had become too high due to World War II sugar and cocoa rationing. So the company removed the vanilla and strawberry bars and created just one all-chocolate nougat piece, which remains today.

Good & Plenty, pink-and-white, sugar-coated black licorice and the oldest continuous brand of candy still made in America, was first sold in 1893 by the Quaker City Chocolate & Confectionery Co. in Philadelphia. In the middle of the last century, sales had stagnated, so candy man Lester Rosskam promoted Good & Plenty with the help of Choo-Choo Charlie, a cartoon train engineer, on television in 1950. On screen, he would shake the box of candy in his hands like a train chugging down the tracks as he sang a jingle. And just like that, the old candy was back.

An English immigrant named Oliver Chase created the mechanical lozenge cutter in 1847, the first automated candy machine in the United States, which produced hard, flat discs of sugar that his company sold as “Hub Wafers” or “Chase’s Lozenges.” Since the sugar wafers were resilient and did not spoil easily, they were brought along by Union soldiers during the Civil War. In 1901, Chase’s company joined two other companies to form the New England Confectionery Company, but it wasn’t until 1912 that the candy was officially given the name NECCO Wafers.

Frank Mars, who was running a failing candy business in Minnesota in the early 1920s, went along with his son Forrest’s idea of making candy bars that tasted like malted milkshakes. The Milky Way bar, which hit the market in 1923, contained chocolate malt-flavored nougat topped with caramel and covered with milk chocolate. The bar was larger than its nickel-bar competitors. Its first-year sales were more than $800,000, pulling Mars back from the brink of bankruptcy and marking the start of Mars, Inc.

In 1912, a Cleveland candy maker named Clarence Crane devised a hard peppermint ring, using a pill-stamping machine to punch a hole through the center so it resembled a life preserver. He called them Life Savers. In 1913, a businessman, Edward John Noble, purchased the brand for $2,900 and solved the problem of lost flavor in the cardboard boxes by creating tin-foil wrappers that sealed in freshness. He then began placing rolls of Life Savers beside store cash registers, making it possible for loose change, especially nickels, to be converted into extra candy purchases.

This content was created with the help of AI.