A jelly bean maker, a hand-piped chick and a Pennsylvania Dutch town.

Peeps are marshmallow candies shaped as chicks, bunnies and other seasonal figures, sold in the United States and Canada and made by Just Born of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Just Born has owned the line since 1953. The chicks did not begin in Bethlehem, though. They began in Lancaster, at a confectioner called the Rodda Candy Company.

English Wikipedia says the R. E. Rodda Candy Company was founded in Lancaster in 1908, and that Roscoe E. Rodda, a member of its board and its president, had earlier managed candy manufacture in Detroit and Cincinnati. Chowhound, in a history of the candy published in March 2024, says Rodda specialised in jelly beans, together with jelly eggs and sugar-coated almonds. The Associated Press described Rodda in January 2023 as a jelly bean maker with a side business producing shaped marshmallow candies by hand.

The town shaped the product. The Deseret News reported in April 2025 that Lancaster was a city historically known for its German religious community, and that Rodda saw Easter as a chance to lift its sales, turning bunnies, jelly beans and crosses into candy shapes. Chowhound likewise says Rodda leaned into the Easter trade with jelly eggs, almonds, marshmallow animals and candy in the shape of crosses.

When the marshmallow chick itself appeared is less certain. Chowhound says a catalogue of sweets published around 1925 shows a Peeps-like product. The Deseret News cites Food & Wine as placing the chick in the early 1940s, made for select customers, and says many buyers initially treated the colourful marshmallow as a decoration rather than something to eat. English Wikipedia dates the name more firmly: by 1948, it says, Pennsylvania retailers were selling “Rodda marshmallow peeps” and “Rodda Easter peeps”.

The making was slow. Chowhound describes a mixture of egg whites and sugar loaded into pastry bags with fluted steel tips, each animal piped by hand with its own wings, then left to air-dry, with even the small dark eyes set in place by hand. The Associated Press put the time needed to make the marshmallows at about 27 hours.

Sam Born’s company, a son trained in physics and a depositor.

The buyer was a family candy business. The Associated Press, in a report carried by PBS NewsHour on 31 January 2023, said Sam Born, a Russian immigrant, started Just Born in New York and later moved the family to Bethlehem, where the company is still based. Chowhound says Sam Born arrived in New York in 1910 and opened a shop in Brooklyn around 1923; the Deseret News says his shop carried a sign reading “Just Born” out front. The company’s own story belongs in our Just Born guide.

In 1953, the AP reported, Just Born acquired the Rodda Candy Co. Chowhound gives the same year. English Wikipedia adds that the product went on being sold nationally as “Rodda Marshmallow Peeps” or “Rodda Easter Peeps” for decades, keeping the Rodda name into the mid-1990s.

The change came under Sam’s son, Ira “Bob” Born. The AP said he graduated from Lehigh University in engineering physics and served in the US Navy. He had been accepted to medical school, the AP reported, but went to work at Just Born while waiting for classes to start and stayed. Chowhound dates his arrival to 1946.

Bob Born saw what the hand-piped chicks could become. The AP said he and an engineer at the company designed and built a machine that made them in less than six minutes, and that the company’s current machines are still based on his design. Chowhound calls it “The Depositor” and says it laid down six rows of chicks at a time. Chowhound says the machine-made chicks lost their piped wings and took on a sleeker shape, the one sold today. That work earned Bob Born the name “Father of Peeps”. He became Just Born’s president in 1959, the AP said, and he came up with the recipe for Hot Tamales.

The AP reported his death in January 2023. On 15 February 2019, it said, the city of Bethlehem had proclaimed the start of the Easter season “Bob Born Day”. Just Born remains family-owned, the AP said, and quoted David Shaffer as its co-chief executive and chairman.

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.

Seasonal shapes, new colours, a minis pack with a chick in the logo and a diorama contest.

Chowhound says chicks were the original shape and that bunnies followed in the 1980s; today, it notes, the range runs to snowmen, reindeer and trees at Christmas, pumpkins, cats and ghosts at Halloween, and hearts for Valentine’s Day. The AP likewise said Peeps sell above all at Easter but are also made for Halloween and Valentine’s Day. English Wikipedia says the company marketed them as “Always in Season”.

Colour widened in the same way. English Wikipedia says the chicks were long made in yellow, pink and white, with lavender added in 1995 and blue in 1998.

The clearest documented packaging project came in 2014. Packaging Strategies reported on 2 July 2014 that Just Born had retained the New Jersey design firm BrandFirst to create the identity and packaging for Peeps Minis, a smaller candy meant for everyday snacking. The trade journal described a pack printed on a silver metallic substrate that worked the chick into the letterforms of the logo. Each bag, it said, carried the familiar Peeps yellow background, a cluster of chicks above a flavour banner, and a brightly coloured border patterned with chicks that identified each variety on the shelf. Brian Bachrach, the senior marketing manager, spoke of giving fans a new way to show their “Peepsonality” every day of the year.

The brand also has a public life it did not design. English Wikipedia says a Peeps & Company shop opened at National Harbor, Maryland, in November 2009. Newspapers ran reader contests for Peeps dioramas, and Washington City Paper reported on 13 April 2017 that The Washington Post had announced that March that it would end its annual Peeps diorama contest. City Paper took the contest on with National Harbor as its partner; the top entry that year was “The Peeple v. O.J. Simpson”.

For a design guide, Peeps shows how a product shape can do the work of a logo: a rounded chick, set by a machine in Bethlehem, repeated in new colours and seasonal shapes. Compare it with Mike and Ike, a fellow Just Born candy, and the parent company’s own Just Born guide. For this guide we use chick yellow, marshmallow pink, lavender and sugar white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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