A Chicago confectioner renames its first bar.

Baby Ruth started as a reworked version of another bar. English Wikipedia says the Curtiss Candy Company of Chicago refashioned its Kandy Kake into the Baby Ruth, and that the bar became a staple of the company for more than six decades. History.com, in an article by Christopher Klein dated 25 September 2014, says the company was headquartered a few blocks from Wrigley Field and that its founder, Otto Schnering, reformulated Kandy Kake — a mix of milk chocolate, peanuts and a soft centre — into a chocolate-covered bar with peanuts, caramel and nougat, giving it a new name at the same time.

The date of that change is given two ways. Wikipedia’s history section and infobox put the bar’s creation in 1920, while its etymology section says the company named the bar “Baby Ruth” in 1921; Klein’s History.com article sets the reformulation and renaming in the autumn of 1921. Both sources agree on the place and the founder.

Schnering promoted the bar with stunts. Wikipedia, citing Andrew F. Smith’s 2012 encyclopedia Fast Food and Junk Food and a 2011 article by Leah A. Zeldes, says that in 1923 he chartered a plane to drop Baby Ruth bars, each with its own miniature parachute, over Pittsburgh, and later repeated the drops in cities across more than forty states. History.com describes biplanes sent from coast to coast to shower cities with bars tied to little silk parachutes, and says the company priced the bar at five cents. In 1929, Wikipedia says, Curtiss sponsored The Baby Ruth Hour, a CBS Radio programme.

The same company also took over another well-known bar. Wikipedia’s etymology section, drawing on the writer David Feldman, notes that Curtiss acquired the Oh Henry! formula around that period, and History.com says the bar later shared a stable with Oh Henry! under Nestlé.

Curtiss, Nabisco, Nestlé, Ferrero.

Curtiss did not stay independent. The two main sources describe the sale differently. Klein’s History.com article says the Curtiss Candy Company was sold in 1963 and changed hands several times in the following years. Wikipedia says Curtiss was purchased by Nabisco in 1981, and that in 1990 RJR Nabisco sold the Curtiss brands to Nestlé, citing a 2011 article by Leah A. Zeldes for Dining Chicago headlined “Named for slugger or president’s kid, candy is Chicago’s baby”. Wikipedia also says Nabisco paid for Baby Ruth to appear in the 1985 film The Goonies.

Nestlé kept the bar for nearly three decades. Wikipedia says it added a Baby Ruth ice-cream bar and a Baby Ruth Crisp, a wafer bar sold in a Crisp line that also included Nestlé Crunch Crisp and Butterfinger Crisp. In 2018 the brand moved again: Wikipedia, citing a Business Wire release dated 31 March 2018 headlined “Ferrero Completes Acquisition of Nestlé USA’s Confectionary Business”, says Ferrero acquired Nestlé USA’s confectionery brands, Baby Ruth among them, and, citing Food Business News in May 2019, that Ferrero folded production of the acquired brands into the Ferrara Candy Company.

Ferrero has owned Baby Ruth since 2018, and Wikipedia names Ferrara, a Ferrero subsidiary, as the manufacturer, with babyruth.com as the official site. Wikipedia says Ferrara relaunched the bar in December 2019 with a new recipe using dry-roasted peanuts grown in the United States, where earlier versions had used peanuts roasted in oil. Ferrara also makes Nerds, while Butterfinger sat beside Baby Ruth in Nestlé’s Crisp line.

Design and documentation.

The candies in this group are American sweets whose identity lives on the outside of the pack. A candy brand’s look is carried by small, cheap and much-handled things: a twist wrapper in a single strong colour, a paper roll of identical pieces, a narrow cardboard box sized for a cinema counter, or a bar wrapper read in a second at a checkout.

Wrapper colour often signals a flavour before any words are read, and a roll pack or theatre box can become as recognisable as the name printed on it. Some wrappers carry more than a name, with jokes, riddles or slogans printed where a label would usually sit, so the packaging becomes part of the product.

Many American candy names have also outlived the companies that created them, passing between owners over the decades while keeping their names and packs. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the candy, who owns it now, where it is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A president’s daughter, a ballplayer and a courtroom.

The name on the wrapper has long been argued over. The Curtiss Candy Company said the bar was named after Ruth Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland; Wikipedia attributes that account to the company, citing Susan Kawash’s 2013 book Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure and Andrew F. Smith’s 2012 encyclopedia. History.com’s Klein, writing in 2014, notes that she had been nicknamed “Baby Ruth” by the press after her birth in 1891 and had died in 1904, while the baseball player Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees was, by 1921, a national sports star. Wikipedia says the company did not negotiate an endorsement deal with the player, and that many saw the official story as a way to avoid paying him royalties.

A third account appears in David Feldman’s Imponderables books. Feldman reports the company’s explanation, adding that the trademark was said to be patterned on the engraved lettering of a medallion made for Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition showing the President, his wife and Baby Ruth; he also quotes Tom Burnam’s More Misinformation, which said the bar was named for a granddaughter of the candy makers George and Mrs Williamson. Wikipedia says David Mikkelson of Snopes, in an entry dated 31 December 1998, disputes the Williamson version and credits Schnering’s alterations to Kandy Kake.

The dispute reached a court. History.com says that in 1926 Babe Ruth licensed his name to the George H. Ruth Candy Company, which sought to register “Ruth’s Home Run Candy”, and that Curtiss contested it; in 1931, in George H. Ruth Candy Co. v. Curtiss Candy Co., the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals found confusion between the two marks likely. Curtiss then leaned into baseball anyway: both sources say that after Ruth’s “called shot” at Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series the company put an illuminated Baby Ruth sign on a rooftop beyond center field, which Wikipedia says stood for some four decades. In 1995, the New York Times reported in 2006, a company representing the Ruth estate licensed his name and likeness for a Baby Ruth campaign, and Klein says the bar became “the official candy bar of major league baseball” under a three-year deal in 2006.

For a design guide, Baby Ruth shows how a name with two possible owners can become a brand’s story, settled in court but kept alive on a ballpark roof. Compare it with Butterfinger, its neighbour in Nestlé’s Crisp line, and Nerds, another American candy brand made by Ferrara. For this guide we use ballpark blue and night navy with wrapper red on nougat cream and a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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