The American Sweets Older Than Your Grandparents: 6 Heritage Brands Over 100 Years Old
The American Sweets Older Than Your Grandparents: 6 Heritage Brands Over 100 Years Old
Walk into any UK American candy shop and you'll see the same five names: Reese's, Hershey's, Nerds, Sour Patch Kids, Warheads. The hits. The TikTok crowd. The brands every retailer leads with.But behind those headline acts is a quieter, much older world. Sweets that were already on American shelves when your grandparents were born. Bars that survived the Great Depression, two world wars, sugar rationing, and the rise and fall of a thousand competitors. Eight of them are still in production today, and most of them are now stocked in the UK.
None of these will go viral on TikTok. None will be the next Dubai chocolate. What they have instead is something more interesting: they have lasted. Each one tells you something about why some sweets endure when so many others vanish.
Here are six American confectionery survivors, in order of when they were first made, plus what each one says about the moment it came from.
1. Tootsie Roll (1896) — 130 years old
The Tootsie Roll is the founding act of modern American confectionery. When Austrian immigrant Leo Hirschfield started hand-rolling them in his small Brooklyn shop in 1896, he was solving a real problem: chocolate melted in summer, and most candy bars couldn't survive the journey from factory to shop in one piece. His chewy, chocolate-flavoured roll travelled in any weather. He named it after his five-year-old daughter Clara, whose nickname was Tootsie.It became the first individually wrapped penny candy sold in America. During World War II, Tootsie Rolls were included in soldiers' field rations because they wouldn't melt in the Pacific heat or freeze in the European winter. The recipe is essentially unchanged in 130 years. The Tootsie Roll Industries portfolio has since grown to include Tootsie Pops, Frooties, Dots, Charleston Chew and Junior Mints — making it one of the largest independent candy companies in America.
It's the candy that proved confectionery could be mass-produced, individually wrapped and shipped anywhere. Without it, the American sweet shop as we know it doesn't exist.
2. Cracker Jack (1896) — 130 years old
The same year Tootsie Rolls appeared in Brooklyn, two German immigrant brothers in Chicago — Frederick and Louis Rueckheim — were perfecting a coating recipe for popcorn and peanuts. The original mixture had been clumping together too much. Louis figured out how to apply a thin caramel coat that kept the kernels separate. A salesman tasted it and said "That's a cracker jack!", which was 1890s slang for something excellent. The brothers registered the name and put it on every box.By 1908 it had been immortalised in the lyrics of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" — "buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack" — which is still the unofficial anthem of every American baseball stadium and is sung during the seventh-inning stretch at every game. In 1912 the brand introduced the prize in every box: a small toy or trinket that turned the candy into a treasure hunt for generations of American children.
The prize is now a digital QR code rather than a tin whistle, but the recipe — caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts in a striped box — has barely changed. Cracker Jack lives in the grocery range rather than the candy aisle, but it belongs in any conversation about American sweet heritage.
3. Mary Jane (1914) — 112 years old
Charles N. Miller worked out of a small candy factory in Boston's North End — the same building, by some accounts, that had once belonged to Paul Revere. In 1914 he combined two flavours nobody had paired before: peanut butter and molasses. He wrapped each piece in waxed paper printed with a smiling Edwardian girl in a yellow dress and called it Mary Jane after his favourite aunt.It became one of America's first peanut-butter-flavoured sweets and inspired generations of imitators, most famously the peanut butter cup that H.B. Reese would launch fourteen years later. Mary Jane survived two world wars, three corporate buyouts, and a brief discontinuation in 2018 before being rescued by Atkinson Candy Company in Texas, who still make them to the original recipe today. The combination of molasses and peanut butter is unlike anything in British confectionery, which is why the Mary Jane funsize bag remains a genuine point of difference for any UK retailer who wants to offer something nobody else has.
4. Baby Ruth (1921) — 105 years old
The Baby Ruth bar has one of the most-debated origin stories in candy history. Otto Schnering of the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago launched it in 1921 and insisted, then and forever after, that it was named in honour of Ruth Cleveland, the late daughter of US President Grover Cleveland. Almost nobody believed him. Ruth Cleveland had died seventeen years earlier and was hardly a household name. Babe Ruth, meanwhile, was the most famous athlete in America and had just hit his record-breaking 60-home-run season.The official story has never wavered, partly because admitting otherwise would have meant paying Babe Ruth licensing fees. The legal record makes interesting reading. The bar itself — peanuts, caramel and nougat coated in chocolate — is a substantial American chocolate bar with a more savoury, peanut-forward profile than anything in the UK chocolate aisle.
Pop culture has kept the name alive. Baby Ruth famously features in The Sandlot (where it kicks off the entire plot when one ends up in Mr Mertle's yard) and in Caddyshack (in the swimming pool scene that everybody pretends to have forgotten). The red, white and blue wrapper has been on American shelves for over a century, and it remains one of the most distinctively American chocolate bars you can put on a UK shelf.
5. Charleston Chew (1922) — 104 years old
Donley Cross was a Shakespearean stage actor in early-1900s San Francisco. After a fall during a performance ended his acting career, he reinvented himself completely — moving across the country to Cambridge, Massachusetts and starting a candy company in 1920 with his friend Charlie Fox. Their first attempt, the Nu Chu, was a modest success. Their second, in 1922, was the Charleston Chew — a vanilla-flavoured nougat bar enrobed in milk chocolate, named to capitalise on the Charleston dance craze that was sweeping America's speakeasies and dance halls.It became one of the longest-running American candy bars of all time. Production moved through Nabisco, then Warner-Lambert, and is now owned by Tootsie Roll Industries — but the recipe and the bar have barely changed in over a century.
The most famous Charleston Chew tradition wasn't part of the original product at all. In the 1950s, owner Nathan Sloane realised that newly-affordable home freezers gave customers a new way to eat the bar. Freeze it for half an hour, then snap it against a hard surface — and the chocolate shatters into bite-sized pieces while the nougat stays chewy. The "Charleston Chew crack" became part of the brand's identity and is still how millions of Americans eat it. It's the kind of detail that makes for a brilliant talking point on a UK retail shelf.
6. Bit-O-Honey (1924) — 102 years old
In 1924 the Schutter-Johnson Company of Chicago launched a candy that bridged confectionery and the breakfast cupboard. Bit-O-Honey is honey-flavoured taffy with real almond bits running through it. The wax paper wrapping with the bee on the front looked old-fashioned even in the 1920s, which was the point: Schutter-Johnson positioned it as a wholesome, almost rustic alternative to the brash new chocolate bars that were dominating American shelves.The candy survived the Great Depression because of how slowly you eat it. A single piece of Bit-O-Honey takes longer to finish than most full bars, which made it excellent value during a decade when every penny mattered. It became an American cinema concession staple by the 1940s — quiet to chew, easy to share, no mess in the dark.
It is now made by the Pearson's Candy Company in Minnesota, the same family-owned firm that's been making sweets since 1909. The recipe, the wrapper, and even the bee mascot have stayed essentially unchanged for 102 years.
Approaching 100: Five More Brands Nearly There
These five haven't quite hit the century mark yet — but at 94 to 119 years old, they're close enough to deserve a mention.Hershey's Kisses (1907, 119 years) are the foil-wrapped chocolate teardrop that gave Hershey its second wind. Originally hand-wrapped one at a time, they became machine-wrapped in 1921 — and the paper plume was added so operators could tell if each Kiss had been sealed properly. Around 70 million are made every day.
Sno-Caps (1927, 99 years) were invented by the Blumenthal Brothers Chocolate Company of Philadelphia specifically for American cinema concession stands — small domes of semi-sweet chocolate covered in white nonpareils, quiet to eat and impossible to drop in the dark. The strategy worked: by 1930 they were in cinemas nationwide. The Blumenthal Brothers' Bridesburg factory was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2023. Find the full chocolate range here.
Milk Duds (1928, 98 years) were named to admit a failure. F. Hoffman & Co of Chicago set out to make a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel. Every batch came out oval. Rather than scrap the idea they called the candy Milk Duds — "duds" being 1920s slang for something that didn't quite work — and put them on sale. Chewy, chocolatey and impossible to eat quickly, they became one of America's definitive cinema treats. You can browse them in the chocolate range.
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (1928, 98 years) were invented by H.B. Reese, a former Hershey's employee who'd left to start a dairy farm and ended up making chocolate in his basement. The peanut butter cup was just one of dozens of products he made by hand. He had no idea it would eventually become the best-selling candy brand in the United States.
Payday (1932, 94 years) was launched in the depths of the Great Depression by Hollywood Brands of Minnesota and named for the day workers most wanted an affordable treat. The bar — peanuts and caramel, no chocolate — has been discontinued at least twice and brought back both times by loyal customers. At 94 years old it's still going.
For Retailers: Why Heritage American Candy Works in a UK Shop
Heritage candy doesn't compete with the TikTok crowd. It does something different — and for many UK retailers, something more profitable.Hamper and gift positioning. Bit-O-Honey, Charleston Chew and Mary Jane have packaging that already looks vintage. They're a natural fit for American-themed gift hampers, retro confectionery boxes, and Christmas selection packs that command higher margins than loose impulse stock.
The cinema theatre box display. Sno-Caps, Milk Duds and Bit-O-Honey all come in the iconic American cinema concession theatre box format. Stacked together with Junior Mints and Whoppers, they create an instantly recognisable display block that doubles as a talking point. The unified shape and size makes merchandising effortless.
The story sells the candy. These aren't just sweets — they're conversation starters. The Charleston Chew freezer trick, the Baby Ruth name controversy, the Milk Duds origin story — these are details that engage customers and that staff can mention at point of sale. Heritage candy gives retailers something to talk about beyond price and flavour.
Resilient margin profile. None of these brands are subject to the boom-and-bust cycles that affect viral candy. Demand is steady year-round, the products have long shelf lives, and customers who like them tend to buy them repeatedly rather than as one-off purchases. They're the slow-burn earners of an American candy section.
The strongest displays combine the famous five (Reese's, Hershey's, Nerds, Sour Patch Kids, Warheads) for footfall with the heritage eight for character. The first group brings customers in. The second group keeps them coming back.
