Posts filed under ‘Heroes and Personalities’
Luden’s Penny Candy Part II
In the previous post, we heard about William Luden’s problem: how could he distinguish his penny candy from the rest of the competition?
Luden hired a team of investigators to quietly sound the market for him. They fanned out over the streets of Philadelphia, visiting all the places penny candies might be bought or eaten. Who was the penny candy customer? How best to reach that customer, and bring those pennies to Luden? Luden’s team visited the candy counters in the department stores, the retail confectioners, the small candy shops. They canvassed school-yards for a direct impression of children’s views.
Luden’s investigators verified that children were the ones buying the penny candies, and they were buying them in the little candy shops. Grown-ups cared about quality, and when they bought candy in the better stores quality might be a deciding factor. But children buying candy for themselves in the little shops didn’t care about quality. They were looking for the biggest, the most, the brightest, the shiniest. If Luden was going to make any inroads on the basis of quality, he was going to have to persuade the parents.
A new advertising campaign was launched with the explicit aim of appealing to parents’ concerns and their influence. The theme of the campaign juxtaposed the parents’ dollar purchases of grown-up candy with the child’s penny choices: “Your child’s penny is as important to us as your dollar.” Luden suggested that the quality to be had at the higher price could also be had in cheaper goods, if they chose the Luden brand. The new slogan: “Penny Candy made with Dollar Care.”
So kids and parents then weren’t so different from kids and parents today. Parents worry about quality, safety, and health effects. Kids look for “extreme” flavors and colors and shapes. But kids today are less free to go where they want, or to buy what they want. On the other hand, marketing today speaks directly to kids, through TV channels promoting “kid power,” and Web sites, and kids “social networks.” Where candy is concerned, it seems there is likely to be conflict between what parents want for their kids, and what kids want. Do today’s lifestyles and technologies make for more conflict, or less?
Source: “Little Stories of Success: William H. Luden: Standardizing Penny Candy for Children—How the Market Was Won by Addressing Parents.” Candy and Ice Cream Aug. 1915: 10.
Related Posts:
Luden’s Penny Candy, 1914 Part I
Mr. William Luden may not be remembered in many high school history books, but you know him just the same. His name has been associated with cough drops since Mr. Luden first started making them in 1878.
By 1914, Luden was a major candy manufacturer, and although his Reading, Pennsylvania factory made all sorts of candy, the main product was menthol cough drops. Lots of them. Six tons a day. Part of the reason he was so successful with the cough drops was that the Luden’s name was known, and customers could be relied on to demand and expect the Luden’s quality in their cough drops. The cough drops were packaged in a pouch bearing the Luden’s name, and Luden advertised heavily, both to retailers and “jobbers” (independent distributors), and also directly to customers.
Luden also made and sold “penny candy,” candy that was unmarked and unadvertised. The retailers and the jobbers would take his penny candy because they knew it was good, and because they had good experience with Luden’s cough drops. But the customers didn’t know Luden’s penny candy from any other, and therein lay the problem. How could Luden make his penny candy stand out for the customer?
No one had ever tried to “brand” penny candy or to advertise it directly to consumers. And initially, Mr. Luden wasn’t sure it could be done. He thought about it on and off for several years, as he watched the way the reputation of his cough drops helped build his business and protected him from the fiercest competition around price fluctuations. In the penny candy business, the profit margins were so slim that the smallest price difference could swing a retail order one way or the other. The only solution Mr. Luden could see would be to establish a standard on the basis of quality, so that slight variations of price would not have such an impact. And the only way to establish quality was to put his name on his penny candies as well.
Could it work?
Related Posts:
Laxatives and the end of Trick or Treating
Halloween is here, and once again we mourn the death of Trick or Treating. It happened exactly fifty years ago, today.
Halloween 1959. Dr. William V. Shyne, a dentist in Fremont, California, was having an off day. Maybe his wife just left him, maybe his pants were too tight, maybe he just didn’t like people. Or rather, maybe he just didn’t like kids.
Kids came around to his house that night, ringing the bell and calling Trick or Treat! Lots, maybe a couple hundred. In 1959, every kid in America under the age of 10 or so was out on Halloween night, making the rounds. They would go in gangs and groups, the older ones on their own, the littlest ones with older kids or their parents, ringing bells and gathering candy loot and howling and hooting.
Dr. Shyne answered the door. And he gave out treats, all right. But his treats turned out to be a mean and nasty trick. Police investigators discovered he had “dispensed” 450 candy-coated laxative pills into kids’ outstretched bags. Thirty of those kids became very, very sick.
Dr. Shyne was charged with “outrage of public decency” and “unlawful dispensing of drugs.” They should have charged him with murder. Because after that, Halloween was never the same.
Halloween 1960 began the era of “Halloween sadism.” Was it safe to Trick or Treat? What maniac might put a LSD tab, or a poisoned Tootsie Roll, or a razor-spiked apple, in little Suzy’s bag? Stories surfaced of pins, needles, razor blades, but they would fade away under closer examination. Nevertheless, Americans came to believe that kids weren’t safe at Halloween. Parents scrutinized their kiddies’ loot and confiscated anything “wierd.” No cookies, no apples, no unwrapped candies, that was obvious. Some towns set up X-ray stations at hospitals to “check the candy.” The festive and free romping of the streets for Trick or Treat faded into a circuit at the mall, a party at church, a supervised promenade to select neighbors homes.
But through all of that, even up to today, there has never been a single substantiated instance of an anonymous sadist causing death or life-threatening injury. Not one.
Dr. Shyne was the first, and only, of his kind.
RIP.
PS. I hear, contrary to the boo-hoo-ers, that in fact in many neighborhoods trick or treat is alive and well, with the proper supervision and safeguards. Like the vampires and zombies of Halloween, Trick or Treat rises from the grave!
Candy and the Polio Vaccine
Unless you’re over 50, you probably don’t have much experience with polio. It’s a nasty viral infection, which can in bad cases cause paralysis of legs, arms, and in the worst cases, your whole body. Polio gave us the Iron Lung (for paralyzed victims who otherwise would die of asphyxiation) and the March of Dimes, which started out raising money for polio research.
A vaccine pretty much eliminated polio from the U.S. and most of the developed world in the 1950s. And candy is part of the story.
In the late 1950s, polio researcher Albert Sabin developed a live virus vaccine to protect against polio. The vaccine had to be taken by mouth. The problem was that it was bitter tasting. Adults might swallow it anyway, but the primary intended beneficiaries of the vaccination programs were children. The obvious solution: put it in candy.
As early as 1959, scientists and confectioners in the U.S.S.R. had collaborated to produce a candy that could deliver the live virus. We don’t know what the confection tasted like, but it must have tasted pretty good. Over 1.5 million Russian children were successfully immunized by eating the vaccine candy.
Here in the U.S., Sabin’s live oral vaccine was approved for general use in 1961. Unfortunately, the Russian candy never made it across the ocean; instead, through the 1960s, the oral vaccine was administered to millions of adults and children as a sugar cube. The vaccine was effective; poliomyelitis is virtually unknown in the U.S. today.
A 1968 article in the New York Times makes the polio vaccine program sound like a party. “Children Frolic and get ‘Candy’ Polio Vaccine” describes a festive event organized by the NYC Health Department at the George Washington Houses in upper Manhattan. With music, toys, balloons and free orange juice, public health officials hoped to draw in pre-schoolers who had not yet been vaccinated against polio. At the event, each child received sugar cube tinted lilac with two drops of the Sabin live oral polio vaccine. Some kids, loving candy, came back for a second piece.
Too bad every vaccine can’t be candy!
More: See my research on the role of candy in the 1916 polio epidemic in Articles: The Candy Prophylactic: Danger, Disease, and Children’s Candy around 1916
Sources: “Children Frolic and get ‘Candy’ Polio Vaccine” New York Times May 22, 1968; “Polio virus Put in Candy” Science News Letter June 27, 1959: 405; “Polio Vaccine Given in Candy, Soviet Says,” New York Times Nov. 26, 1959.
Oliver Chase and Necco Wafers: Where It All Began
In 1847 in a small drug store in Boston, Oliver R. Chase turned the crank on his latest invention, a device that would press and cut candy lozenges. As the machine-cut sweets emerged from the press, the modern world of candy was born.
The lozenge cutter probably wasn’t much to look at, just a small table-top, hand operated machine, similar to a large pasta maker. Chase could not have known as he watched the first batch of opaque disks emerge from the machine that he was changing candy forever. The lozenge cutter was the first candy-making machine. Out of that little device arose the American candy industry, and the commercial manufacture of candies on larger and larger scales.
Oliver Chase wasn’t really in the candy business. He was a pharmacist. But in the nineteeth century, if you wanted something candy-ish, the pharmacy was the place to go. Pharmacists had for centuries been using sugar to “make the medicine go down.” Sugar disguised the often bitter or unpleasant tastes of medicinal herbs and compounds. And for many maladies, sugar itself was viewed as a beneficial drug. Chase’s first “lozenges” were sold to soothe the throat or to settle the stomach. The line between “drug” and “candy” was, in those days, pretty fuzzy. (Come to think of it, we’re still a little worried about the “drug”-like qualities of candy, but that’s for another day…)
If you’re wondering what that 1847 lozenge might have tasted like, it’s easy to find out. Just run down to the store and buy a roll of NECCO Wafers. These chalky candies seem peculiar today, but in the late nineteenth century many similar candies were made and sold, and they were very popular. Chase was making basically the same recipe in his pharmacy; once he could automate the cutting of the pasty dough, his production took off, and with in a few years he had a flourishing candy business, Chase and Company, the first in a group of companies that would come together as the New England Confectionery Company, or NECCO.
More: Michael Nusair, who took the fabulous photo at the top of this entry, reviews NECCO Wafers at candyrageous.com
Poets and Candymakers: Louis Untermeyer
Candy has no doubt inspired plenty of poetry. While I can’t think of any particular odes to candy’s beauty, a candy dish surely must have fueled many a fire of poetic stamina. And as it turns out, one of the U.S.’s most beloved and influential poets of the twentieth century was a candy lover too.
Louis Untermeyer will be known to any college English major as the editor of numerous anthologies of English and American poetry used in classrooms across the country. He was also a poet, essayist, and literary personality in his own right, publishing over 100 books and anthologies.
Untermeyer lived from 1885 to 1977, nearly a century. Those were the decades when America set its claim to be a “nation of candy eaters,” decades of candy passion on the part of ordinary people, met with incredible variety, creativity, and deliciousness in the candy industry. A poet and a candy enthusiast, he was the perfect choice to write the book on candy at mid-century. In fact, had Untermeyer’s poetic ambitions been less successful, he might have found a career in the candy business:
Being born with the proverbial sweet tooth, I have always found myself lingering in the vicinity of some candy store or other. … Sweets have always changed my disposition and altered my metabolism for the better. As the sugared flavors trickle past my palate, my heart leaps up, the blood courses with a livelier rhythm and my pulse beats with a happier throb. … I have never outgrown my youthful dream of working as chief sampler in a candy factory. (9)
Untermeyer’s book is called: A Century of Candymaking, 1847-1947: The Story of the Origin and Growth of the New England Confectionery Company Which Parallels that of the Candy Industry in America. Published in 1947, the volume marked the centenary anniversary of the invention of the first candy making machine in America: the lozenge-cutting machine, invented by Oliver Chase. Chase’s little candy enterprise would eventually grow into the New England Confectionery Company, one of the biggest and most important candy companies of the twentieth century.
The book was commissioned by the New England Confectionery Company as an official corporate history. The volume includes Untermeyer’s essay, illustrative color plates, a pictorial “trip through the modern factory,” maps of Boston’s historic candy sites and of the global origins of candy ingredients, and a chronology of major candy events from 1847 to 1947. Given the absence of any scholarly or popular history of the candy business in this period, A Century of Candymaking is, all in all, a quite useful little book.
It was not entirely Untermeyer’s work. Historian Marion F.Lansing did all the research and collecting, as Untermeyer acknowledges. But Untermeyer wrote the text. His unique voice and his boyish love of candy bring the stories of American candy heroes to life. There are such notables as Oliver Chase, of the famous lozenge machine; Daniel Fobes, who patented “mocha” in 1867; and Abner Moody, who used his whittling skills to carve fantastical novelty candy molds in the 1870s.
The best of the writing is a Valentine to the candy itself: Gibralters and Pralines and motto wafers and the boggling “array of color, perfection of shape and variety of flavors” that fascinated at the candy shop. Untermeyer indulges his nostalgia for the good old days when he would run to the candy shop, nickel in hand, and while away the afternoon imagining the possibilities. Candy shops, and candies, alas long gone. We’re fortunate to have A Century of Candymaking to show us what’s been lost.
Readers say…