Laffy Taffy: The Candy That Comes With a Joke

What do you call a cow with no legs?

Ground beef.

That joke is on the wrapper of a piece of Laffy Taffy. So is 'What did the house wear to the party? — A dress.' And 'What's an owl's favourite subject? — Owlgebra.' These jokes are terrible. They are supposed to be terrible. The terrible joke is not incidental to Laffy Taffy — it is the product. The stretchy fruit taffy is excellent, but the stretchy fruit taffy is also the delivery mechanism for a piece of paper with a pun on it, and generations of American children have argued with some seriousness about which is more important.

Laffy Taffy is one of the more unusual candy success stories in American confectionery history: a product that defined itself not by its flavour or its texture — though both are genuinely distinctive — but by the experience of opening the wrapper. Every single piece. Every single time.

Paul F. Beich and the Candy That Wasn't a Caramel

The Beich Candy Company was founded in 1893 by Paul F. Beich in Bloomington, Illinois. It spent the first seventy-odd years of its existence making conventional confectionery — the Beich Whiz bar, a chocolate-covered marshmallow product, was its best-known line. In 1971, Beich launched a new product: a fruit-flavoured taffy in a thick, square-shaped piece, sold individually wrapped. They named it 'Beich's Banana Caramels.' It was not, by any reasonable definition, a caramel. It was taffy — a sugar and corn syrup confection that is aerated by stretching until it becomes light, chewy and slightly elastic. The caramel name appears to have been a category decision from an era when 'candy' needed a more specific subcategory to sit in, and taffy — being American — was not the obvious choice for a Midwestern confectionery company's packaging.

Banana was the first flavour. This matters for reasons that come later.

The jokes on the wrapper appeared in the 1970s, while the product was still produced by Beich. The company began soliciting joke submissions from children and printing the best ones on the inside of each individual wrapper. The mechanism was straightforward: the jokes were terrible on purpose. A groan-inducing pun is more memorable than a mildly amusing one. A joke that makes you show it to the person next to you — so they can groan too — is a more effective piece of marketing than almost anything a confectionery company could buy. The name that connected the texture of the candy to the entertainment of the wrapper was Laffy Taffy, and Beich adopted it before they sold the business.

Nestlé, Wonka and Thirty-Four Years of Factory Magic

In 1984, Nestlé acquired Beich's Candy Company and Laffy Taffy entered what would become its longest and most visible chapter — the Willy Wonka Candy Company era. For the full story of how Nestlé came to own the Wonka brand and what eventually happened to it, see the Willy Wonka ownership guide. For Laffy Taffy, the Wonka period meant cross-promotion with every film adaptation, golden ticket contests, and a portfolio that positioned the candy alongside Nerds, Fun Dip and Gobstoppers as part of a unified Wonka candy universe.

The Wonka branding suited Laffy Taffy well. The joke-on-the-wrapper proposition — a candy that came with a piece of entertainment — fit naturally alongside a brand built on the idea that confectionery should be an experience rather than a transaction. Under Nestlé, Laffy Taffy expanded from the original thick square format to the thinner, longer rectangular shape that is now standard, and the Rope format was introduced — a longer, stretched version in individual fruit flavours that became one of the brand's bestselling lines.

In 2003, the Willy Wonka brand introduced Flavor Flippers — a piece of Laffy Taffy with an outer layer of one flavour and a soft centre of a completely different flavour. The concept was pure Wonka: candy as magic trick, a sweet that behaved unexpectedly mid-chew.

The Banana Problem

Banana Laffy Taffy is simultaneously one of America's most beloved candy flavours and one of its most argued-about. The flavour does not taste like a banana. Not a banana as anyone eating one in 2026 would recognise it. The flavour is brighter, more intense, almost synthetic — a concentrated fruit hit that has only a passing relationship to the Cavendish banana available in any British supermarket.

The explanation is historical. When artificial banana flavouring was first developed and refined in the early-to-mid twentieth century, the dominant variety of banana in American shops was the Gros Michel — a variety that was larger, creamier and more intensely flavoured than the Cavendish that replaced it. Panama disease, a fungal infection, swept through Gros Michel plantations in the 1950s and effectively wiped out commercial production of the variety by the 1960s. The Cavendish, which is resistant to the specific strain that killed the Gros Michel, became the replacement. It tastes different. Milder, less fragrant, closer to what British consumers know as a banana.

The artificial banana flavouring — isoamyl acetate, if you want the chemical name — was developed to capture the Gros Michel's flavour profile, not the Cavendish. By the time the Gros Michel disappeared from shops, the artificial flavour had been standardised. Candy companies kept using it because consumers already associated it with banana candy, regardless of whether it matched the fruit that had replaced the one it was modelled on. Banana Laffy Taffy doesn't taste like the banana you buy in Tesco. It tastes like the banana that Americans ate before most of them were born. It is a flavour that now exists only in candy.

The Number One Single

In 2005, an Atlanta hip-hop group called D4L released a song called 'Laffy Taffy.' It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. For a candy that had spent thirty years being the product you found in your Halloween bag or bought at the cinema concession stand, this was an unexpected form of cultural validation. The song's success had no direct relationship to Laffy Taffy's sales, but it embedded the brand's name in a generation of American pop culture at a moment when the Wonka era was at its height. A number-one hit named after a piece of fruit taffy is not something that happens to most confectionery brands.

Ferrara, the Joke Contest and 450 Million Minibars

In January 2018, Nestlé announced the sale of its US confectionery business — including Laffy Taffy, Nerds, Fun Dip, SweeTARTS and the rest of the Wonka portfolio — to Ferrero SpA, the Italian company that makes Nutella, for $2.8 billion. Ferrero folded the acquired brands into its Ferrara Candy Company subsidiary. For the full story of how the Wonka brand passed from Nestlé to Ferrero, see the Willy Wonka ownership guide.

Under Ferrara, Laffy Taffy has continued its joke tradition with increasing enthusiasm. In 2022, the brand held a joke writing contest that received 6,500 submissions from the public. A dedicated curation team selected the top 101 jokes to add to the brand's joke library — a formal archive of terrible puns from which wrapper jokes are drawn. The jokes are selected for two qualities: they must be family-friendly, and they must produce a groan. Both are requirements.

The brand currently produces over 450 million minibars every year. The Mystery Swirl Rope — a flavour that changes batch to batch, with Ferrara declining to confirm what it actually is — applies the same logic as the Airheads White Mystery bar: the unknown is part of the product. You buy it to find out what it tastes like. You buy it again because you want a different answer.

Laffy Taffy at Sweet and Glory

The Laffy Taffy range at Sweet and Glory includes seven rope flavours — Cherry, Strawberry, Grape, Sour Apple, Wild Blue Raspberry, Banana and Mystery Swirl — in 23g individually wrapped format, alongside Laffy Taffy Mini's in 1.4kg tubs across Assorted, Banana, Blue Raspberry and Sour Apple, a Stretchy and Tangy Banana format, and the 12.2kg bulk case for pick and mix. The Laffy Taffy Assorted Peg Bag and Valentine's All Reds Heart Box complete the seasonal range. For the full Ferrara candy story — the company that also owns Nerds, Fun Dip and Tootsie Roll — see the linked guides. Browse the candy range for the complete imported selection. No minimum order. Free first parcel on orders over £150 ex VAT (additional boxes £7.10 each). Free pallet delivery over £650 ex VAT. Dispatched from Manchester.

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