Halloween, the only holiday where it’s socially acceptable to go to your neighbor’s house demanding food. Could I just have the candy? But have you ever thought about where those delicious, sweet treats come from? Well, besides that plastic pumpkin on the porch of the house with the lights off that says one piece per kid. Today on this blog, we’re talking about the bizarre backstory of your favorite Halloween candy.
From Chicken Feed to Candy Corn:
First up, we have the most polarizing treat on the market, candy corn. Originally known as chicken feed, it was created by the Wunderle Candy Company, George Renninger, in the 1880s. By 1889, candy corn was also being produced by Goelitz Confectionery, known today as Jelly Belly of jelly bean fame. Today, most candy corn is actually manufactured by Brach’s Confections because no one thought enough of candy corn to bother trademarking it. People loved agriculture-themed candy. And the 19th century saw a slew of buttercream confections aimed at the rural markets. Think candy chestnuts, candy clovers, and candy turnips. Originally designed as more of a seasonal candy, the brightly flavored morsels, meant to look like pieces of corn on the cob, didn’t catch on as a Halloween-specific staple until around 1950. Around 35 million tons of candy corn are produced every year, or 9 billion pieces of individual candy. We also recommend eating candy corn with salted peanuts. Mm.
The Science and Myths Behind Tootsie Pops:
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Depending on what bird you ask, the answers may vary. Agree, agree. For the benefit of a great and necessary field of research, there have been several scientific experiments to uncover the secret lick count of the elusive lollipop. Purdue researchers built a licking machine to go at it and came to a final tally of 364, which spurred a University of Michigan student to build his own licking machine, averaging 411 licks, at which point, we hope, someone sat the deans of these very prestigious colleges down to have a serious discussion about what projects their grant money was funding. Meanwhile, mathematicians at NYU came up with 1,000 licks based on calculations regarding the solubility of hard sugar.
But Florida scientists came up with double that amount. 2,000, then you get to savor the Tootsie Roll at the center. By chewing? Nah, you lick that, too. So the answer is it takes somewhere between 364 and 2,000 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
Like the mysteries of Stonehenge and the pyramids, Tootsie Pops are one of the last remaining mysteries that science cannot explain. Another enduring mystery of the Tootsie Pop is what we like to call the curse of the starred wrapper. Growing up, you may have heard a rumor that finding the image of a star on your Tootsie wrapper was a golden ticket. If you sent your wrapper in, Tootsie Roll Industries would net you some sort of Willy Wonka-esque prize. Cash? Cavities for life, maybe? As it turns out, neither. The company debunked the rumor on its website, saying, in fact, a shooting star appears on one in every four to six Tootsie Pop wrappers, just as frequently as the other images appear.
Today, Tootsie Roll Industries is one of the largest candy makers in the world, churning out 64 million morsels every day. Its legacy can be traced to its progenitor, the Tootsie Roll. Created at the turn of the century by Austrian-American candy man Leo Hirschfield, he patented the formula in 1907.
Snickers: The Horse That Became a Billion-Dollar Bar:
Snickers, the only candy that you can reasonably get away with calling a meal. It’s like we added ground-up peanuts to something, and suddenly it’s lunch. Snickers entered the market in the 1930s, named after the favorite horse of the Mars family, the dynasty behind Mars Bars, Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, Twix, basically anything with nougat. Snickers is the crowning jewel in Mars, Inc.’s sticky chocolate crown. It is the number one candy sold in the entire world, bringing in $3.6 billion annually on that one bar alone.
That really satisfies. With over 15 million Snickers made daily, you’d think the quality control of Snickers would be a little lax, but no, every bar has exactly 16 ground-up peanuts. The production of Snickers is so tightly regulated that it was a big deal in 2009 when the weight of the bars was reduced by 9% to prevent overeating. The weight of Snickers has actually varied wildly over the years. It started at 2.5 ounces and ballooned up to 2.75 in 1940 before seeing its weight halved the following decade. Better? Better.
The Kiss That Outsold Its Original:
Hershey’s Kisses. What’s more enticing as a kid than seeing those little drops covered in shiny foil with a perfect piece of paper sticking out? Any teacher who passed them out was a legend. However, one thing our educational system failed to inform us was that the chocolates we know and love weren’t created by Hershey’s at all. In 1894, a candy man named Henry Oscar Wilbur invented a sweet by pouring melted chocolate into a teardrop-shaped mold with a raised insignia reading “Wilbur.” He called them Wilbur’s Buds, aw.
During this time, Milton Hershey, a real Henry Ford of the confectionery world, was figuring out ways to automate the production line for the 1900 release of his Hershey chocolate bar. He saw that teardrop shapes could easily be replicated by squirting chocolate onto a flat surface, saving a bunch of time and, one assumes, mold money. Hershey’s Kisses were released 14 years after Wilbur’s Buds, but the Kiss immediately outsold Buds on the market in 1907, even though the two were basically identical.
But Bud still chugged along, keeping pace with the Kiss and various other competitors until 1921, which is when Hershey updated his factories to automate the silver foiling process. Buds, which had been using the foil since its inception, couldn’t keep up with the speed of Hershey’s mass production. He went on to sue Milton for stealing his idea. Considering Hershey’s remains a brand name over 120 years later, and nobody has ever heard of Wilbur’s Buds unless they’re lying to impress you, today, the Hershey empire ranks up there as one of the big four chocolatiers, alongside Mars, Cadbury, and Nestle, a lot of it due to Milton Hershey’s factory innovations rather than his original ideas for candy.
Kisses wasn’t even an original name for the treats. An 1856 Webster dictionary definition for the word already described it as a small piece of confectionery. It would take Hershey’s 95 years till they were able to secure the Kisses trademark in 2001, after a survey found that most people already associated the phrase with the product.
From Martian Men to Sour Patch Kids:
Sour Patch Kids, the mouth-puckering sour gummy candy that’s shaped like kids, not the most obvious choice for a popular treat, what with the implicit candy cannibalism and the fact that they tend to stick to your teeth. Originally named Mars Men, Sour Patch was created by a guy named Frank Galatolie while he was working for Jared International in Ontario back in the early ’70s. By the time the candy made it to America in 1985, Cabbage Patch Kids were all the rage. Martian men became human children as the brand attempted to cash in on the Cabbage Patch trend. The candy even got a new mascot, a tow-headed blonde boy with his tongue lolling out on the cover of the packs. That boy was based on Galatolie’s son, Scott, and again, leads to some troubling questions. Is the mascot the consumer of the candy or the child whose likeness you’re chomping on? Is it both?
Chemistry plays a huge part in the Sour Patch formula. The gummies’ coating of tartaric and citric acid, which are activated by protons in saliva, registers on the tongue as sour. There was even an official Sour Patch Kids cereal. You know, what kid doesn’t want to wake up in the morning to sour-tasting milk? Sour Patch Kids also joins the ranks of sweets that have branched into ice cream and video games. Shout out to anyone who remembers Capcom’s 2011 World Gone Sour on PlayStation. The candy also has the unique distinction of having been used in a beer.
Bob Craft Beer introduced Sour Catch, a Belgian pale ale flavored with candy in 2009. It was sold out by Halloween.
Hot Tamales: The Cinnamon Confection:
If you like your jelly beans big and spicy, shaped like a pill, and tasting like pungent cinnamon, Hot Tamales are the candy for you. Created in the 1950s by the mad scientists at Just Born, Incorporated, Hot Tamales fit in amid the ranks of their other offerings, Mike and Ikes, Peeps, and Peanut Chews, as candy people either love or would rather die than eat. The movie theater concession staple was named the number one cinnamon candy in America in 1999, which is really the ultimate in consolation prizes. I mean, how many other cinnamon candies can you even name? Cinnamon has a long and storied history as a sweet treat. It contains the chemical cinnamaldehyde, which is a skin irritant. So naturally, humans throughout time have been hellbent on eating it.
Cinnamon can be found in the Bible, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Sanskrit. By the 19th century, we figured out how to isolate cinnamaldehyde and put it directly into medicine and candies. Red Hots, the predecessor to Hot Tamales, first hit the markets in the 1930s. And ever since then, we’ve been upping the Hot Tamales ante. There’s Super-Hot Tamales, 2011’s Three Alarm Tamales, and Hot Tamales Fire and Ice. Debuting in 2018, Fire and Ice mixed a discontinued spearmint variant in with cinnamon Hot Tamales, creating a mouthfeel equivalent of the series finale of Game of Thrones, so less of a song of ice and fire and more of a scream.
M&Ms: Chocolate That Won the War:
“M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand.” While that slogan may sound cute and somewhat dirty, the original slogan for the hard-shelled Mars chocolates actually has a pretty dark history. In 1937, HI Rountree and Company in England began producing a small hard-shelled candy to sell to British soldiers fighting the Spanish Civil War. Originally called Smarties, not to be confused with the other Smarties candy, they were pitched as snacks that wouldn’t go gooey in the heat, keeping hands clean and combat-ready. Working at Rountree at the time was a shrewd candy man named Forrest Mars, the estranged son of Frank Mars. The father and son had a falling out over who invented the Milky Way bar.
The Mars family had all kinds of drama going on behind the scenes. Forrest realized candy sales dropped in the summer, specifically chocolate, which tended to melt in your hand, your purse, or the back pocket of your white linen pants right before an interview. A small, portable, non-melty chocolate candy was just the ace in the hole Forrest needed to return to America with his head held high. He received a patent for his borrowed candy idea in 1941.
When World War II broke out, America began rationing. Hershey’s had been given control of 100% of the nation’s chocolate. Instead of returning to his family, Forrest came up with a plan. He approached Bruce Murrie, the son of Hershey’s president, William Murie, with a proposition from one passed-over kid to another. What if they formed their own chocolate company? And that’s how the Mars & Murrie company, or M&M, was born. Originally, their candy was offered exclusively to American forces, but the GIs took them home.
By the time the war ended and it was made available to civilians, M&Ms already had a head start on cornering the market as the chocolate that won’t slop up your clothes.
Skittles: Taste the Rainbow:
Skittles, nature’s fruit-flavored M&Ms. Skittles are produced by Wrigley’s, which is owned by none other than Mars, Inc., which did eventually get the M&M license when Forrest rejoined his father’s company. This really needs to be a gripping Succession-style drama. But while the candies may look alike, and, in the case of 2007’s chocolate mix, Skittles and key lime pie M&Ms, occasionally share a wrapper, they couldn’t be more different.
While M&M had a famous backstory tied to the most significant war in modern history, the birth of Skittles is a mystery. No one knows who invented Skittles. Most sources point to an uncredited British company as the first producer of Skittles in 1974, before the candy magically appeared in America five years later. According to the 1994 Taste the Rainbow campaign, a man named Mr. Skittles invented the namesake candy after looking at a rainbow. In actuality, Skittles probably came from the European game called Skittles, which uses a slightly smaller bowling ball that comes in a variety of colors. We prefer the Mr. Skittles story.
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: The King of Halloween Candy:
We saved the best for last, and obviously, it’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. And before you ask, no, that’s not personal preference talking. It’s an unbiased and immutable law of nature. Harry Burnett Reese, HB to his friends, began working at Hershey’s Chocolate factory in 1921, which is not the fun Wonka-Esque experience it sounds like. Reese didn’t have a lot of options. He’d had to work three, and sometimes four, jobs to bring in enough money to feed his wife and 16 kids. That’s too many kids, Reese. Talk about Reese’s Pieces. During his five-year tenure, Reese developed a prescient philosophy. If Hershey’s can sell a trainload of chocolates every day, he later said, I can at least make a living making candy.
Reese spent five years working at Hershey’s, taking scrupulous notes, which he then took home and applied to his side hustle, an ad hoc candy shop run out of his basement. He’d started small, producing your basic mints, hard candies, chocolate-covered raisins, candied nuts, and what have you, which he’d sell to nearby department stores. But his dream? Stuffed chocolates. Indeed, it is a dream we all share.
One of his early inventions was the Lizzie Bar, named after his daughter, who remembers her dad getting up at 3:00 AM to crack and grate coconuts for his chocolate-covered caramels. By 1926, Reese’s various confectionery treats were making him enough money to quit Hershey’s to focus on his passion for putting things into chocolate and smushing them together. The company moved from Reese’s basement to a nearby Pennsylvania factory, where there was no filling he wouldn’t try. Coconuts with caramel, coconuts with cream, coconuts with honeydew, big coconut guy, Reese was. But to his credit, he also made peppermint creams, chocolate jets, nutties, nougats, peanuts, and raisin clusters, to sell as a mixed assortment of chocolates.
To round out the grab bag, Reese reached for the closest ingredient he had yet to try, peanut butter, which he’d sandwich in paper cups layered between cooling slabs of Hershey’s chocolates. My man had no shame. But the cups were so pretty that Reese ended up putting them in store windows to attract customers. By 1935, they were popular enough to make as a standalone dessert. Then the war broke out, and as we now know, Hershey had the rights to all the chocolate rations. Reese was forced to rely exclusively on his peanut butter cups, as his other chocolates didn’t have a Hershey’s hookup.
But it proved fortunate, and Reese’s peanut butter cups became the shining jewel of the family crown. Reese died in 1956, leaving the company to his sons, who, in turn, sold 5% of their stock to Hershey’s for $25 million. Today, that stock would be worth over a billion, thanks to its popularity as the best Halloween candy in the world. Not an opinion, that’s just science.
Conclusion:
From basement candy shops to billion-dollar brands, every Halloween treat has its own wild origin story. These candies didn’t just fill trick-or-treat bags, they shaped pop culture, science, and even wartime history.
So next time you unwrap a Reese’s or crunch a candy corn, remember you’re tasting a little piece of sweet history. Which one’s your favorite? Drop it in the comments, and keep your candy stash stocked. Halloween comes once a year, but the stories are forever.
FAQs:
1. Where did candy corn come from?
Candy corn was invented in the 1880s as “chicken feed” and became a Halloween favorite by the 1950s.
2. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
Science says anywhere between 364 and 2,000 licks, depending on who’s doing the licking.
3. Why is Snickers named Snickers?
It’s named after the Mars family’s favorite horse, talk about sweet inspiration.
4. Who made Hershey’s Kisses first?
Technically, Henry Wilbur’s “Wilbur Buds” came first, Hershey just perfected and mass-produced the idea.
5. Why are Sour Patch Kids shaped like kids?
They started as “Mars Men” but were rebranded in the 1980s to ride the Cabbage Patch Kids craze.
6. What makes Hot Tamales so spicy?
It’s the chemical cinnamaldehyde in cinnamon, a mild irritant humans somehow love to eat.