A shop on North Avenue, a kettle of caramels and a calendar of candy.

Brach’s is an American candy brand associated with candy corn, jelly beans, conversation hearts, caramels and the bagged and seasonal sweets sold in supermarkets and drugstores. It belongs to the Ferrara Candy Company, whose headquarters are in Chicago, and Ferrara has been owned by the Italian confectioner Ferrero since 2017. The Chicago Tribune reported on 13 December 2018 that Ferrara had been acquired by Ferrero the previous year, and the brand’s own website carries a Ferrara Candy Company copyright line.

The brand began in Chicago. In the timeline on its website, Brach’s says that in 1904 Emil J. Brach invested his life savings to open Brach’s Palace of Sweets at the corner of North Avenue and Towne Street in Chicago, Illinois. The company says the shop’s offerings included taffy, caramels, ice cream and other confections. English Wikipedia, citing Leslie Goddard’s 2012 book Chicago’s Sweet Candy History, says Brach started with his sons Edwin and Frank and a single kettle, and that caramels remain a mainstay of the range.

The same company timeline dates the arrival of Brach’s jelly beans to the 1910s, the opening of a second Chicago factory at Franklin and Ohio streets to 1915, and the beginning of candy corn production to the 1920s. Brach’s says that in 1923 it began building a new facility on Chicago’s West Side, the Kinzie Plant, which consolidated its production in one place and allowed it to add chocolate to its range.

By the middle of the century the brand had settled into the calendar. Brach’s says it expanded into seasonal candy in the 1950s, adding Valentine’s Day conversation hearts, Easter jelly beans and Halloween candy to its portfolio. English Wikipedia, again citing Goddard, says the company concentrated after the Second World War on bulk and bagged candy and promoted candy corn and other autumn candies in single-serve packets as trick-or-treating spread.

In 1958, the company says, it introduced Pick-A-Mix, a display adapted from the candy barrels of general stores. Shoppers scooped their choices from a wide selection of bulk candy and paid one price per pound. Brach’s presents the idea as a way of carrying the old habit of buying loose candy at the general store into the modern supermarket.

A consumer-products group, a Swiss owner, a chocolate maker and a candy company.

For two decades the brand sat inside a large American consumer-products group. English Wikipedia says that American Home Products Corporation bought the company in 1966. The Chicago Tribune reported on 22 April 1990 that the Swiss entrepreneur Klaus Jacobs had bought E.J. Brach from American Home Products in December 1986, bringing it into his Jacobs Suchard group, and that Jacobs had spoken at the time of building global brands from European names such as Milka and Toblerone.

In that report the Tribune’s Merrill Goozner described the business Jacobs had bought. E.J. Brach & Sons, he wrote, relied on in-store displays in grocery stores, drugstores and discount retailers to sell individually wrapped hard candies and chocolate-covered peanuts, while an in-house sales force placed specialty items such as mints beside restaurant cash registers. Goozner reported that the new owners replaced much of the senior management and then the upper ranks of sales and marketing, and he quoted Ray Lalowski, the candy buyer for Walgreen’s, who said that ahead of one Easter the company had not settled which items it would sell or what the packaging would look like, and that his chain dropped Brach for that season and went to Farley.

The ownership structure shifted again in the early 1990s. The Chicago Tribune’s George Lazarus reported on 28 July 1993 that Jacobs owned the Van Houten Group and its U.S. arm, Brach Van Houten Holding, of which Brach was the flagship and which also included Andes candies. The company, then based in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, had just appointed Kevin T. Martin as president and chief executive, Lazarus wrote.

English Wikipedia says Brach’s combined with the Brock Candy Company of Chattanooga in 1994, operating for a time as the Brach and Brock Candy Company and later as Brach’s Confections, and that the chocolate maker Barry Callebaut took over the business in 2003. Brach’s says that in 2007 Brach’s Confections was sold to the Farley’s & Sathers Candy Company.

The present owner took shape over the following decade. The Chicago Tribune reported on 19 October 2017 that the private equity firm L Catterton had bought Ferrara Pan Candy Co. in 2012, merged it with Farley’s & Sathers and shortened the name to Ferrara. The same report described Ferrara as the Oakbrook Terrace-based maker of Brach’s, Trolli and Lemonhead, said it was being acquired by Ferrero, and said Ferrero would run it as a separate unit. On 13 December 2018 the paper reported that Ferrara would move its headquarters from Oakbrook Terrace to Chicago’s Old Post Office, and Brach’s says on its timeline that it moved back to the city of Chicago in 2019.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are American sweets and regional potato chips: boxed chocolates, jelly beans, cinnamon candies, marshmallow shapes and chips sold mainly in the cities where they began. Brands of this kind sit at very different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that have passed through several owners, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket aisle.

A candy or chip brand’s identity is usually carried less by one product than by a box, a bag, a seasonal pack and a name, because the company behind it may have changed hands, moved its production or grown well beyond the place where it started. Candy boxes and holiday packs return each year with familiar colours, while a regional chip bag often leans on the city it comes from. That makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A redrawn logo, a seasonal shelf and campaigns built around the holidays.

The brand’s identity is organised around the calendar. Its website groups the range by season, with separate sections for Easter, Halloween, the winter holidays and Valentine’s Day, alongside an everyday range. In autumn the site features Classic Candy Corn, harvest and autumn mixes, Mellowcreme pumpkins and Milk Maid Caramels, and it pairs the candy with recipes for cookies, bark and other seasonal treats.

The mark itself has been revised in recent years. Brach’s says that in 2018 it redesigned its logo and launched new packaging, under the line “New brand look, same delicious candy.” Its timeline adds that the brand has since unveiled modern new branding, which it presents as a mark of its position in the category and its future.

Flavour has become part of the seasonal identity too. Brach’s says that in 2013 and 2014 it introduced limited-time candy corn flavours, among them pumpkin spice, caramel and s’mores, and that it now launches a new candy corn flavour each autumn. English Wikipedia also lists pumpkin spice, s’mores and caramel among the candy corn flavours, and describes seasonal nougats in flavours that change from year to year.

Advertising and partnerships have carried the name beyond the store. Brach’s says that in 2000 it combined candy and pop music in a partnership with the band NSYNC, and that in 2022 it launched a campaign called “Make Moments Sweeter”, which celebrated holiday connections and their small quirks. Its about page uses the same phrase, describing a brand present at celebrations large and small and handed down as a family tradition.

Display has mattered as much as the pack. Pick-A-Mix, introduced in 1958 according to the company, put loose candy in self-service bins priced by the pound, and the Chicago Tribune’s 1990 account described a business sold through in-store displays and a large sales force with a modest amount of national advertising.

For a design guide, Brach’s shows how a candy brand can build its identity on the seasons, with bags, bins and flavours that change through the year while the name stays fixed. Compare it with Lemonheads, the Ferrara Pan candy that now shares its owner, and Nerds, another Ferrara brand. For this guide we use kernel orange, harvest yellow, sugar white and brick red with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Brach’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.