Baby Ruth vs Babe Ruth: The Candy Bar Controversy That Ran for a Century
Baby Ruth vs Babe Ruth: The Candy Bar Controversy That Ran for a Century
In 1921, a Chicago candy company called Curtiss relaunched one of its less successful products under a new name: Baby Ruth. The timing was notable. That same year, George Herman Ruth — known to the entire country as Babe Ruth — had set the major league baseball home run record for the third consecutive season and was, by any reasonable measure, the most famous person in America. The Curtiss Candy Company insisted the name had nothing to do with him.The explanation they offered was this: Baby Ruth was named after Ruth Cleveland, the eldest daughter of President Grover Cleveland. Ruth Cleveland had been known to the American press as 'Baby Ruth' when her father returned to the White House for his second term in 1893. She was a charming story — a president's daughter, beloved by a country that fiercely followed the Cleveland family's private life. There was just one problem.
Ruth Cleveland had died of diphtheria in 1904. She was twelve years old. The Curtiss Candy Company did not exist until 1916. Baby Ruth launched in 1921. The bar that claimed to honour a former president's daughter appeared on American shelves seventeen years after that daughter's death, twenty-four years after her father left the White House, and at the precise moment when the name 'Ruth' belonged to the most celebrated athlete in the country. The company had not sought or received any endorsement from the Cleveland family.
Otto Schnering and the Kandy Kake
Otto Schnering founded the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago in 1916, a few blocks from Wrigley Field. His first product was called the Kandy Kake — a chocolate-covered bar of peanuts, caramel and nougat. It sold adequately. It did not become a phenomenon. In 1921, Schnering reformulated the Kandy Kake and gave it a new name. He chose 'Baby' rather than 'Babe' — one letter's difference — and 'Ruth' from the most famous name in American sport.Or so the almost universally held belief goes. Schnering maintained throughout his life that the Cleveland story was the true one, and the timing was a coincidence. A handful of accounts suggest the bar may actually have been named after the granddaughter of George Williamson, a candy maker who sold the original formula to Curtiss. If this third version is true, the President Cleveland story was a cover story for an even more mundane explanation. What is certain is that the Curtiss Candy Company never attempted to clarify the connection. They were quite happy for the public to draw its own conclusions.
The Marketing That Said Everything
If there was any ambiguity about what association Schnering was cultivating, the marketing strategy removed it. In 1923, with Baby Ruth sales growing but not yet dominant, Schnering chartered biplanes to fly over cities across more than forty states dropping thousands of Baby Ruth bars, each attached to a small paper parachute. It was one of the most theatrical product launches of the era. The free candy falling from the sky was designed to create the impression of a product as big, as dramatic, and as American as the man whose name it almost shared.The strategy worked at a scale Schnering had not anticipated. By 1926, Baby Ruth was selling at a rate of one million dollars a month. The Curtiss factory had become one of the largest confectionery manufacturing facilities in the world. One contemporary account reported more than two hundred dedicated freight cars distributing Baby Ruth bars across the country. The bar that Schnering had refused to name after Babe Ruth had made him rich by borrowing everything about Babe Ruth except the formal licensing agreement.
The Counterattack That Failed
By 1926, Babe Ruth had grown tired of watching a product bear his name — near enough — while he received nothing. He entered an agreement with the George H. Ruth Candy Company to create a rival bar called Ruth's Home Run Candy. The wrapper showed a smiling Ruth in his Yankees uniform. The note on the packaging read 'Babe Ruth's Own Candy.' It was unambiguous. It was what the Baby Ruth wrapper had never quite been.The Curtiss Candy Company sued for trademark infringement.
This was a remarkable legal position. The company whose product was almost universally understood to have been named after the baseball player sued the baseball player for using his own name on a candy bar. Their argument was that 'Ruth's Home Run Candy' was too similar to 'Baby Ruth', the trademark they had established. The court, in 1931, agreed. The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled in favour of Curtiss, noting that Babe Ruth appeared to be attempting to capitalise on his own nickname at a moment when Baby Ruth was selling a million dollars of bars every month. Ruth's Home Run Candy was forced off the market. Babe Ruth's own candy bar, endorsed by Babe Ruth and named for Babe Ruth, was deemed too close to the name of a bar named for a president's daughter.
The Called Shot and the Sign
The story reached its most extraordinary moment in October 1932. During Game 3 of the World Series at Wrigley Field — a few blocks from the Curtiss factory — Babe Ruth allegedly pointed to centre field before hitting a home run to exactly that location. The 'called shot' became one of the most debated moments in baseball history, argued over for decades.The Curtiss Candy Company's response was to erect an illuminated advertising sign for Baby Ruth on the rooftop of a building across the street from Wrigley Field, as close as possible to where Ruth's home run ball had landed. The sign stood for four decades. The company that had successfully argued in court that their bar had nothing to do with Babe Ruth was now advertising on the spot made famous by Babe Ruth's most legendary home run, at the ballpark on the same street as their factory, in the city where they had made their fortune. The sign was not subtle.
The Goonies, the Simpsons and a Century of Pop Culture
Baby Ruth's cultural afterlife has been long and strange. In 1985, Nabisco — which had acquired Curtiss in 1963 — paid $100,000 for Baby Ruth to appear in The Goonies. The scene in which Sloth, the misunderstood creature chained in the Fratelli family basement, is befriended by Chunk after Chunk throws him a Baby Ruth bar, is one of the most recognisable candy moments in American film history. 'RUTH! RUTH! RUTH! Baby Ruth!' Sloth bellows, in a line that has been quoted ever since. Whether Sloth was responding to the candy bar or the baseball player was, appropriately, never clarified.The bar has appeared in The Simpsons, in Hellboy, in Family Guy and across American popular culture in the decades since. In 1995, a company representing the Babe Ruth estate finally licensed his name and likeness for use in Baby Ruth marketing — seventy-four years after the bar first appeared. It was, for the estate, better late than never. For Babe Ruth himself, who died in 1948, it was considerably too late.
A Billion-Dollar Brand, a Nickel to Ruth
The Curtiss Candy Company was sold in 1963. Baby Ruth passed through Standard Brands, Nabisco and Nestlé before Ferrero acquired it in 2018 as part of a $2.8 billion purchase of Nestlé USA's entire confectionery portfolio. Ferrero relaunched the bar in December 2019 with a new recipe — dry-roasted American peanuts, no artificial preservatives, a cleaner ingredient list than the bar had carried for most of its life. The bar that Babe Ruth never earned a cent from sold, as part of a wider portfolio, for nearly three billion dollars.The Baby Ruth available today — from Sweet and Glory in 54g and King Size 94g — is Ferrero's version: peanuts, caramel, nougat and compound chocolate, unchanged in concept from what Otto Schnering put in American shops in 1921. It remains, alongside Reese's and Hershey's, one of the defining American chocolate bars. For the broader story of American sweets that have outlasted the controversies that created them, see the guide to American sweets older than your grandparents. For the baseball candy connection explored further, the Tootsie Roll guide covers Junior Mints, which became the official candy of Major League Baseball in 1971 — a deal Babe Ruth would, perhaps, have appreciated.
