Here’s one for the ‘Just for Fun’ file. I recently discovered a well-buried post on Mental Floss that reveals the origins of some quirky confection names we all know well. I was deliciously surprised by a select few…
You don’t usually think about it, when you glace at a candy bar, ice cream bar or after-dinner mint wrapper. But where on earth did some of those crazy-sounding names come from?
Two extremes
Candy bar names, especially, present an ultra-polemic range in terms of their literary transparency (or lack thereof). But all beanches of the candy tree suffer the same naming quirks.
On one hand, you have Hershey’s and Nielson’s Milk Chocolate, Baby Ruth and even the onomato-poeic ones such as Crunch! In the middle, you find the less-enigmatic ones that make simple sense in connection with the products they name. Such as Three Musketeers, Coffee Crisp, Mounds and Twix.
But at the extreme other end of the spectrum, you wade into a verbal swamp inhabited by wild creatures that go by names like Snickers, Kit Kat, Tootsie Roll, M&Ms and Pez.
Got me thinking…
The Mental Floss post touched on just a few popular candy confections. But it got me thinking. And I ended up leaking-away a good 2 hours clicking around online, tracing the origins of some brands I wondered about…
Kit Kat
Originally a posh chocolate intended for the middle and upper British classes, the bar was initially named ‘Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp’. But when Nestlé bought it, they wanted to ‘elevate’ it even fur-ther. And renamed it after the posh London ‘Kit Kat’ social club.
Nestlé’s websitesite says: “The name was chosen to add a hint of sophistication and grandness to this sweet and smooth snack.” Contrary to expectations, Kit Kat became a ‘workingman’s’ favourite in the US.
Tootsie Rolls
Who is Tootsie? And how did she get her name on the roll? The Tootsie Roll website reveals: “An Austrian immigrant, Leo Hirshfield, produced the candy in a small store in New York City and ended up naming the candy after his five-year-old daughter Clara, whose nickname was ‘Tootsie’.” Now, you know.
Snickers
Here’s a good one… The official website claims the original Snickers bar was allegedly named after a horse. That was back in 1930, in Chicago. It sold for a nickel. The name was changed to the more-prosaic Marathon bar when it entered the UK market, in 1967.
The classic surpassed the $1 billion-in-sales mark in 2013. Now, who’s snickering?
Mars
A lot of people think the bar was named after the planet, which was named after the Roman God of War. The planet looked red to earky astronomers – the colour of blood. But that’s all a red herrings. It’s the original candy bar sold by the Mars family, once the richest family in the US, witha combined estimated worth of over $4 billion.
(That was before the information revolution, and the rise of tech giants such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.)
They also own 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, M&M’s, Skittles, Snickers, Twix, and Bounty.
Pez
This popular, pop-up candy was originally intended as an alternative to smoking. It was, “invented in Vienna, Austria, by Eduard Haas III […] in 1927,” the website explains. “The name PEZ comes from the German word for peppermint, ‘PfeffErminZ’, taking the P from the first letter, E from the middle and Z from [the end].”
Little was known about the addictive properties of nicotine back then. The candy didn’t catch on with smokers – because it didn’t work. But the kids loved it! PEZ finally came to the US in 1952.
Milk Duds
I love this one! How many times have you heard about an iconic product that was created by acci-dent? Milk Duds were so named because inventor Edwin Holloway couldn’t come up with a process to produce the milk chocolate-covered caramels in perfect spheres – the central notion behind his con-cept. As folks so often label failures, defects or just generally ‘things that don’t go off’, he called them ‘duds’. And the name stuck!
My take
It’s fitting that folks in the candy business should have healthy senses of humour – like Ed Holloway (of Duds fame), and Tootsie Roll’s Leo Hirshfield!
Got a product whose name makes you wonder? Or giggle? Or grimace? You can probably find out why by by visiting the manufacturer’s website and clicking on the ‘history’ or ‘about’ link…
Cheers!
~ Maggie J.