The History of American Candy: From 1896 to the Sour Boom

American confectionery has a habit of starting by accident. A man trying to make a carbonated tablet invents Pop Rocks. A company stuck with the wrong machinery invents Airheads. A carpenter mixing cough syrup invents Jell-O and sells it for four hundred and fifty dollars. Almost none of the products on an American sweet shelf were the thing anybody set out to make.

This is the story of how that shelf came together, roughly in order, and why so much of it still tastes the way it did a century ago.

The Victorian Foundations

The oldest brands still in production date from the turn of the twentieth century, and their survival has more to do with sugar economics than nostalgia. Sugar was cheap, refrigeration was not, and a sweet that kept for months without spoiling was a genuinely useful product.

The Tootsie Roll is usually dated to 1896, when Leo Hirschfield is said to have begun selling them from a New York shop. The date is doubtful — the historian Samira Kawash has pointed out that the patent dates from 1907 and the 1896 story appears only later — but the product is real enough, and it solved a specific problem: chocolate that would not melt in a pocket. Hirschfield had also worked on Bromangelon, an early powdered gelatin dessert, which puts him in the same story as Jell-O.

Jell-O itself came from Pearle Wait, a carpenter in Le Roy, New York, who was making cough syrup in 1897 and tried flavouring granulated gelatin. He could not sell it and gave up two years later for four hundred and fifty dollars. The buyer nearly did the same before the advertising found its footing.

Charms arrived in 1912. Moon Pie followed in 1917, invented because a Kentucky coal miner asked for something as big as the moon. Then came the decade that built the American chocolate bar as a category: Baby Ruth in 1921, Milky Way in 1923, Snickers in 1930 and Three Musketeers in 1932, with Just Born founded in 1923 and Milk Duds in 1928 — the last of those an admission of failure, since the sweets were meant to be perfectly round and the machinery could not manage it.

The Mars bars in that list are worth noting for a British reader, because the names did not travel intact. What America calls a Milky Way is closer to a British Mars bar, and the British Milky Way is a different, lighter product entirely. Snickers was sold in Britain as Marathon until 1990. Same company, same era, different names on each side of the Atlantic — which is the single most common source of confusion in American confectionery.

The Hershey Era

The single most consequential thing in American confectionery is that Milton Hershey worked out how to make milk chocolate cheaply, and did it with a process that produces butyric acid. That is the tang British drinkers notice and Americans do not, and it is why American chocolate tastes different to this day.

It also created an ecosystem. H.B. Reese worked on Hershey's dairy farm, left to make sweets of his own, and built a peanut butter cup that depended entirely on buying chocolate cheaply from his former employer. Hershey bought the company outright in 1963. That pattern — a small maker growing up alongside a giant and eventually being absorbed by it — repeats through the whole century.

The Post-War Inventions

The 1950s and 1960s produced a run of products that were, without exception, mistakes.

Lik-M-Aid, the flavoured sugar powder that became Fun Dip, went on sale in the early 1950s; the stick was not added until 1973. Pop Rocks came in 1956, when William A. Mitchell at General Foods was trying to invent a tablet that would carbonate water. The tablet failed. Mitchell also invented Tang, Cool Whip and Jell-O instant pudding, and held over seventy patents by the time he died in 2004.

Trident launched in 1960 and turned sugar-free in 1964, which made it one of the earliest sugar-free confectionery products anywhere. That same year NASA packed it for the Gemini missions, on the practical grounds that brushing teeth in orbit is difficult.

1982: The Two Years That Built the Modern Shelf

A single Chicago company did more to shape the current American sweet aisle than anyone else, and it did it in about twenty-four months.

Breaker Confections had spent years making Lik-M-Aid and Tart 'n Tinys. In 1980 it renamed itself Willy Wonka Brands, after a film that had lost money on release a decade earlier and only found its audience through television repeats. Then it launched Runts in 1982 and Nerds in 1983. Both are still in production more than forty years later.

Nerds won Candy of the Year in 1985, and the twin-chambered box was the result of research showing that boys tipped sweets straight into their mouths while girls poured them into a hand. The box was built to serve both.

The same window produced Airheads, in 1985, and its origin is the best accident in the industry. Van Melle had built machinery in Kentucky to make a rice-paper-wrapped fruit chew for Lipton Tea. Consumers disliked the rice paper, Lipton walked away, and the company tried the chew without the wrapper simply to justify the equipment. The name came from the inventor's sons, who used it to mean someone a bit silly.

And Sour Patch Kids, which are not American at all. They were created in Ontario in the early 1970s as Mars Men, shaped like martians to catch the post-Apollo space enthusiasm, and only renamed in 1985 to ride the Cabbage Patch Kids craze — at which point they were reshaped into children and introduced to the United States.

The Sour Turn

The last genuinely new thing to happen was sourness, and it arrived late. Warheads were invented in Taiwan in 1975 and reached America in the early 1990s. Toxic Waste followed in 2001, built on malic acid and hazard-drum packaging.

The timing matters. By the 1990s the American chocolate aisle had been settled for sixty years — Hershey, Reese's, Snickers and M&M's between them had the category locked, and no new entrant was going to displace them on chocolate. Sour was the open ground, and it belonged to brands nobody had heard of a decade earlier.

What made sour different from every flavour trend before it is that it is not really a flavour at all. It is a physical reaction, and it can be escalated indefinitely — which is why the category has kept growing while others plateaued, and why it now underpins everything from freeze-dried sweets to liquid and spray formats built entirely around the face somebody pulls.

Why the Old Flavours Still Taste Old

One detail explains more about American confectionery than any other. Artificial banana flavour is built on a compound called isoamyl acetate, standardised when the dominant commercial banana was the Gros Michel — a larger, sweeter, far more strongly perfumed variety than the one we eat now. Panama disease ended Gros Michel production through the 1950s and the milder Cavendish replaced it. The flavouring never changed.

So banana Laffy Taffy and banana Runts do not taste like a banana. They taste like a banana almost nobody alive has eaten. That is the industry in miniature: a formulation locked in place by accident, kept because changing it would be worse than leaving it, and now tasting of history rather than fruit.

The American Range at Sweet and Glory

Most of the brands in this history are still in production and still imported. Tootsie, Charms, Baby Ruth, Milk Duds, Moon Pie, Fun Dip, Pop Rocks, Nerds, Runts, Airheads, Sour Patch Kids, Warheads and Toxic Waste all sit in the current range, alongside the sour and novelty formats that came later. Browse the full candy range or the American candy wholesale guide for how to build a section from it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

When did American candy start? The oldest brands still in production date from around the turn of the twentieth century. Tootsie Roll is conventionally dated to 1896, though the patent is from 1907 and the earlier date is doubted by historians. Charms followed in 1912, Moon Pie in 1917, Baby Ruth in 1921 and Milk Duds in 1928. What they have in common is shelf life: before refrigeration was widespread, a sweet that kept for months was a genuinely useful product.

What is the oldest American sweet still made? Tootsie Roll has the strongest claim, depending on which founding date you accept. Charms, from 1912, is the oldest with an undisputed date. Both are still made to recognisably the same formulation, which is unusual — most confectionery of that age has either disappeared or been reformulated beyond recognition.

Why were so many American sweets invented by accident? Because the industry grew out of general food manufacturing rather than confectionery specifically. Pop Rocks came from an attempt to make a self-carbonating drink tablet. Airheads came from machinery built for a Lipton Tea product that failed. Jell-O came from a carpenter experimenting with cough syrup ingredients. In each case the company had equipment or a formula and no product, and worked backwards.

What changed American candy in the 1980s? Two things. One Chicago company, renamed Willy Wonka Brands in 1980, launched Runts in 1982 and Nerds in 1983, both of which are still in production. And Airheads arrived in 1985 from an abandoned Lipton project. That short window produced a disproportionate share of what sits on an American sweet shelf today.

Why does American banana flavour taste wrong? Because it was modelled on a different banana. Artificial banana flavouring was standardised around isoamyl acetate when the Gros Michel was the commercial variety — sweeter and far more strongly perfumed than the Cavendish we eat now. Panama disease ended Gros Michel production through the 1950s, but the flavouring was never updated. Banana sweets taste of a fruit most people have never eaten.

Related guides: Why American chocolate tastes different · American sweets vs British sweets · Most popular American sweets UK · Retro American candy: 80s and 90s brands · American sweets older than your grandparents · American candy wholesale buyer's guide

Sources

Samira Kawash, Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure - on the disputed 1896 Tootsie Roll date
US Patent 3,012,893 (1961) - gasified candy process, William A. Mitchell
Van Melle / Perfetti Van Melle company history - Airheads origin, 1985
Jaret International / Mondelez - Sour Patch Kids as Mars Men, Ontario, early 1970s
Oxford English Dictionary and contemporary trade press - Jell-O, Pearle Wait, 1897

Written by Sharon Wilson, Sweet and Glory. Sweet and Glory has imported American and world confectionery into the UK from Trafford Park, Manchester, since 2015.