The subheading for this post could be random fun facts about how random candy brands got their names. Overthinker or endlessly curious? You decide… This post is an homage to all the children who have known the excitement of holding out their empty bag and ringing that first doorbell on Halloween.
Does anyone else ever wonder how a candy bar got its name? For instance, why is a Snickers called a Snickers? In 1930, Mars introduced Snickers, named after the favorite horse of the Mars family.
What about candy that has a more unusual name like the Squirrel Nut Zipper? It was introduced in 1926 by the Squirrel Brand Company whose managers developed a vanilla nut caramel, but had no name for it yet. A local newspaper reported a case of a drunk man who had to be talked down from a tree by the police. They asked him to explain himself and he said “it must have been the Nut Zipper”, a then popular alcoholic drink. The managers decided that would be the perfect name for the new candy.
A Three Musketeers? Take a look at this commercial from early television for the Three Musketeers bar. Quite the production for its day.
Dum Dums were originated by Akron Candy Company in Bellevue, Ohio, in 1924.
I.C. Bahr, the early sales manager of the company, named the lollipops Dum Dums, thinking any child could pronounce it.
One of my favorites, the Fifth Avenue candy bar, was introduced in 1936 by Luden’s. The name was an attempt to associate the candy with fashionable 5th Avenue in New York City. Interestingly, despite not being advertised since 1993, the candy bar is still available in many smaller retailers.
And what’s the real story about the origin of the name of the Baby Ruth candy bar? Is it named for the baseball great Babe Ruth? Or for President Grover Cleveland’s daughter Ruth? Or neither? The Baby Ruth bar came about when Otto Schnering, founder of the Curtiss Candy Company, made some alterations to his company’s first candy offering, a confection known as ‘Kandy Kake. How cool was this marketing by the company founder? He chartered a plane in 1923 to drop thousands of Baby Ruth bars, each with its own miniature parachute, over the city of Pittsburgh. Whatever the real origin the name of the candy, in 1985 Nabisco paid $100,000 for the product placement of Baby Ruth to appear in the film The Goonies.
George Renninger, an employee of the Wunderle Candy Company is considered the inventor of candy corn about 1880. Wunderle was the first company to make the staple of Halloween, but it was the Goelitz Candy Company that really popularized the candy. In 1898, Goelitz began marketing the kernels as a candy called “Chicken Feed,” writes Rebecca Rupp in National Geographic. That’s because before World War I, most Americans didn’t really think of corn as people food.
Along the way in candy land, I found a site that showed different names for products depending on the country they are sold in. It is too fabulous not to share. In Quebec, Canada, KFC is PFK. Because the province has strict language laws, the English “Kentucky Fried Chicken” is required to have a French equivalent. Thus KFC is “Poulet Frit Kentucky,” or PFK for short.
