An ice cream store in Golden, then a candy plant in a barn.

Jolly Rancher started as an ice cream business in Colorado. The Golden History Museum & Park, the City of Golden’s history museum, says in an article published on 1 March 2023 that Dorothy and Bill Harmsen moved to Colorado from Minnesota in 1942. Bill was a pilot for Continental Airlines who wanted a business of his own; the couple bought a farm in Wheat Ridge, a few miles east of Golden, where Dorothy grew and sold flowers and fruit and the Harmsens made doll beds and cocktail trays in a woodworking shop in their barn. Then they tried ice cream. The museum says they opened their Jolly Rancher Ice Cream Store in Golden, Colorado, on 28 May 1949, under the “Howdy Folks” arch on Washington Avenue.

The name was chosen for its mood. The museum says “Rancher” gave the store a Western aura and “Jolly” suggested a friendly atmosphere; English Wikipedia puts it the same way, saying the Harmsens wanted the impression of a friendly Western company. The first summer was hard. Rainy weather and too little ice cream equipment, the museum says, left the couple with more liabilities than assets, and to get through the winter they added a line of bulk and boxed chocolates, at first supplied by a small Denver candy firm. The combination worked, and the Harmsens opened franchise stores in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. The original Golden store was sold in 1951, while the couple went on supplying chocolates to the franchises.

The candy that changed the business was a cinnamon stick. The museum says requests for the Harmsens’ five-cent hot cinnamon taffy stick, known today as Fire Stix, a recipe the couple developed while in Golden, became so frequent that they saw a new opportunity. They pulled the old horse stalls out of their barn, set up a candy manufacturing operation within months, hired a candy maker and renamed their home the Sugar Bar Ranch.

Beatrice, Leaf, Hershey and a move to Canada.

Wikipedia says the hard-candy line grew out of that stick’s popularity, and that the original flavours were watermelon, apple and Fire Stix, followed soon after by individually wrapped candies in the same three flavours. It says the company filed the Jolly Rancher word mark with the U.S. trademark office in March 1958 and that it was registered in April 1960. Cherry, orange, tangerine, lemon, grape, peach and sour apple came later, and Wikipedia says blue raspberry eventually replaced lemon.

Ownership passed through three large food companies. The museum says Jolly Rancher merged with the Beatrice Foods Company of Chicago in 1966, and Wikipedia adds that Bill Harmsen continued to run the business after the sale. Wikipedia says Leaf, Inc. acquired a group of candy brands from Beatrice, Jolly Rancher among them, in 1983. The next step was a licence rather than an outright sale. The Chicago Tribune reported on 19 October 1996 that Hershey Foods had disclosed a licensing arrangement with Huhtamäki, the Finland-based parent of Leaf, under which Hershey would market Leaf’s confections, led by Jolly Rancher, in the United States and Canada. The same deal covered Good & Plenty, Whoppers, Milk Duds, PayDay and Heath, and Hershey sold most of its European candy operations, including Gubor in Germany and Sperlari in Italy, to Huhtamäki. The museum dates the Hershey step to 1997; Wikipedia, like the Tribune, gives 1996. Hershey has marketed Jolly Rancher in the United States and Canada since that deal.

Production then left Colorado. The museum says the Wheat Ridge plant closed for good in 2002 and that the candies are now made in Canada; Wikipedia says Hershey moved manufacturing to Mexico when it closed the Colorado plant. ConfectioneryNews reported on 5 December 2014 that Hershey had acquired the Allan Candy Company, the Ontario-based firm that was its contract manufacturer for Jolly Rancher hard candy and Lancaster caramels in North America, and that Allan Candy operated a plant in Granby, Quebec, which would join Hershey’s Canadian manufacturing network. Wikipedia says Jolly Rancher manufacturing was then moved to the Granby plant.

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 Western name, a Disney-trained designer and a jewel-bright range.

The visual identity began with the name. Both the museum and Wikipedia trace “Jolly Rancher” to the Harmsens’ wish to sound friendly and Western, and the museum’s account of the business is full of that ranch setting: the “Howdy Folks” arch over the Golden store, the barn turned candy plant and a farmhouse renamed the Sugar Bar Ranch. The museum says Bob Cormack, a former Walt Disney artist, designed most of Jolly Rancher’s packaging through the 1950s and 1960s, and its online collection holds Jolly Rancher items, including two bound volumes of Sugar ’N Spice, the company’s monthly newsletter, which Dorothy Harmsen edited.

The flavours are the other half of the look. Wikipedia describes the hard candy as glassy in appearance, and the range has been built on colour-coded fruit: cherry, blue raspberry, grape, green apple and watermelon are listed as current flavours, with sour, cinnamon and smoothie varieties alongside. Wikipedia lists a run of mixed bags under their own names, among them Fruity Bash in 2015, a spicy Hotties mix in 2017 and a tropical bag in 2020, and says an all-lemon bag returned in 2013 and an all-peach bag in 2020. Jolly Rancher has also been used on gummies, jelly beans, lollipops and sour bites, and, Wikipedia says, a line of soda made by the Elizabeth Beverage Company from 2004.

For a design guide, Jolly Rancher shows how a regional story — a Colorado couple, an ice cream store and a cinnamon stick — can carry a candy name long after production moves, and how a range of clear, saturated fruit colours can do the work of a pack design. Compare it with Twizzlers, another Hershey candy brand, and Good & Plenty, which came to Hershey in the same 1996 deal. For this guide we use cherry red, green apple, grape and blue raspberry with a Western slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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