Quaker City and a capsule of pink and white.

Good & Plenty began in Philadelphia. English Wikipedia says the candy was produced by the Quaker City Chocolate & Confectionery Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1893, and The Hershey Company, which makes and sells the candy today, gives the same maker, city and year on its own Good & Plenty page.

The candy itself is simple to describe. Wikipedia calls it a narrow cylinder of sweet black licorice, coated in a hard candy shell to form a capsule shape, with the pieces coloured bright pink and white. Hershey’s product page uses almost the same words, describing narrow cylinders of sweet licorice coated in colourful pink and white candy shells. The same page says the candy contains licorice extract and other flavours, and explains that licorice extract is a natural flavour obtained from the root of the licorice plant.

The packaging carries the third colour. Wikipedia says the pink and white pieces are presented in a purple box or bag, so the brand’s look rests on three tones: the pink and white of the shells and the purple of the pack. Hershey’s own pages set the name in capital letters as GOOD & PLENTY, with the ampersand at the centre of the wordmark.

The brand has a companion line. Wikipedia says a second candy, Good & Fruity, is a multicoloured, multi-flavour sweet of the same capsule shape. Hershey’s current pages present Good & Plenty as a licorice candy in pink and white, and describe it as a retro candy, in the company’s words a treat that never goes out of style.

Warner-Lambert, Leaf, Hershey.

The brand has passed through several owners. English Wikipedia says Warner-Lambert purchased Quaker City in 1973 and sold it to the Leaf Candy Company, then owned by Beatrice Foods, in 1982. Leaf brought Good & Plenty into a wider confectionery business that, according to Wikipedia’s article on Leaf International, was later held by the Finnish group Huhtamäki.

The move to Hershey came in 1996. Wikipedia’s Leaf International article says that in 1996 the Hershey Foods Corporation acquired the Leaf North American confectionery operations from Huhtamäki Oyj, and that over the following years Leaf’s manufacturing and sales in the United States were folded into Hershey’s existing operations, which Wikipedia says effectively ended Leaf’s existence as a separate operating unit in the United States. Leaf’s European and Asian business, with brands such as Läkerol, Jenkki and Sportlife, went to the Dutch company CSM in 1999, according to the same article. Hershey’s own Good & Plenty page says the candy joined The Hershey Company in 1996. The Hershey Company has made and sold Good & Plenty since 1996, alongside its chocolate brands.

Hershey also says where the candy is made today. Its frequently asked questions on the Good & Plenty page state that the licorice candy is made in Memphis, Tennessee.

Hershey’s pages for the brand also look back. They repeat the 1893 date and the Quaker City name and quote the brand’s old jingle. Hershey also notes on the same page that the candy contains wheat and tells buyers to check each package for current ingredients.

Design and documentation.

American candy usually reaches people as a wrapper or a box, and the pack is seen before the sweet inside is ever tasted. A sweet that sits on a cinema counter, a petrol-station rack or a supermarket checkout has only a moment to be picked out, so the pack has to carry the name, the flavour and a sense of the brand at a glance. Colour does much of that work, along with lettering that can be read from a distance and a shape that stays the same from one decade to the next.

Many of these names have changed hands over the years, passing between family firms, larger confectionery groups and food conglomerates, and production has sometimes moved far from the town where a candy began. The box or wrapper is often the part that stays recognisable through those changes.

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

A boy, a box and a railroad jingle.

Good & Plenty’s advertising is remembered for a character and a song. English Wikipedia says that beginning around 1950 a cartoon character named Choo-Choo Charlie appeared in Good & Plenty television commercials. Charlie was a boy pretending to be a railroad engineer, and in the commercials he shook a box of the candy in a circular motion, imitating a train’s pushrods and making a sound like a train.

The jingle has a named author. Wikipedia says advertising executive Russ Alben wrote the Choo-Choo Charlie jingle, basing it on the popular song “The Ballad of Casey Jones”. Hershey quotes the words on its own Good & Plenty page — “Love my GOOD & PLENTY! Really rings the bell!”, followed by a line about loving no other candy so well — and says the tune and the Choo-Choo Charlie character were featured in commercials in the 1950s.

The box is at the centre of that advertising. In the commercials Wikipedia describes, Charlie shook the box itself in a circle to make the sound of a train, and Wikipedia describes the purple box or bag as the pack the pink and white pieces are sold in.

The colours have stayed steady. Wikipedia and Hershey both describe the pieces as pink and white, and Wikipedia describes the purple box or bag. Good & Fruity, the multicoloured companion line, uses the same capsule shape in other colours and flavours, according to Wikipedia.

Hershey continues to sell the candy under the GOOD & PLENTY name in capital letters, and its pages present the brand with the jingle, the 1893 date and the Memphis production site side by side.

For a design guide, Good & Plenty shows how two shell colours and a box colour can carry a candy through several owners, from Quaker City to Hershey. Compare it with Red Vines, another American licorice, and Jolly Rancher, another Hershey candy. For this guide we use candy pink and box purple with licorice black on shell white and a western display serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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