Sold first as “caramels”, then renamed for a laugh.

Laffy Taffy began in central Illinois. English Wikipedia says the candy was first produced in the 1970s by Kathryn Beich Candies of Bloomington, Illinois; The Takeout, in an article by Dennis Lee dated 16 October 2023, says Laffy Taffy has been around since 1971. At first the product did not carry its present name. Wikipedia, citing the retailer OldTimeCandy, says it was sold as “Beich’s [flavour] Caramels”, although the pieces were in fact fruit-flavoured taffy squares rather than caramels.

The Beich company later renamed the product “Beich’s Laffy Taffy”. According to Wikipedia, which cites the website Snack History, that change came some years before Nestlé acquired the distribution rights and then, in 1984, bought the product line outright. The name, Wikipedia says, refers both to the stretchy texture of the taffy and to the silliness of the jokes that came to be printed on its wrappers.

The candy itself has changed shape along the way. Wikipedia says Laffy Taffy was originally advertised as having a “long-lasting” flavour, and that the pieces, once thick and square, are now sold as thinner rectangles. The pieces are individually wrapped, and the flavours Wikipedia lists include banana, strawberry, green apple, grape, watermelon, blue raspberry and cherry. Under Nestlé the candy sat within the Willy Wonka brand: Wikipedia says that in 2003 Wonka introduced a variety called “Flavor Flippers”, in which each piece had an outer layer of one flavour around a soft centre of another.

The brand’s present website, run by Ferrara Candy Company, presents the range as a family of formats rather than a single chew, listing Minis and Stretchy Ropes alongside the classic pieces, and sorting the products by flavour rather than by size.

Beich, Nestlé, Ferrero and Ferrara.

Laffy Taffy has changed hands twice since it left Bloomington. The first move was to Nestlé, which, Wikipedia says, took the distribution rights and then bought the product line in 1984. The taffy then became part of Nestlé’s American confectionery business, and Wikipedia’s 2003 example shows it being developed under the Willy Wonka name.

The second move came in 2018. BBC News reported on 17 January 2018 that Nestlé was selling its US sweets and chocolate business to the Ferrero Group of Italy, the maker of Nutella, Tic Tac and Ferrero Rocher, and said the business included Laffy Taffy, Chewy Gobstopper and BabyRuth. The BBC said the deal was expected to go through by March of that year. Wikipedia says Ferrero folded the acquired brands into the operations of the Ferrara Candy Company, a Ferrero subsidiary, in 2019.

Ferrara Candy Company has owned Laffy Taffy since 2018, according to The Takeout, which says the company also produces Nerds, SweeTarts, Gobstoppers, Pixy Stix and Fun Dip. The brand’s own website carries a Ferrara Candy Company copyright line, and Wikipedia describes Laffy Taffy as an American brand of taffy produced by Ferrara, a subsidiary of Ferrero. The same 2018 sale took Nerds from Nestlé to Ferrero, so two of the Wonka-era candies now sit side by side again at Ferrara.

The 2018 sale also moved other American candy names from Nestlé to Ferrero; BBC News named Crunch, Nerds, Runts and Butterfinger among them. For Laffy Taffy the result is a chain of three owners — Beich, Nestlé and Ferrero — with the candy’s name and its wrapper jokes carried through each change.

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 question on the outside, the punchline underneath.

The defining feature of Laffy Taffy’s packaging is the writing on it. English Wikipedia says short question-and-answer jokes are printed on the outside of each wrapper, some based on puns and others on simple word play. The Takeout says printing jokes on the wrapper is a tradition dating back to the 1980s, and that the company maintains the jokes will always be part of the product. The brand’s own website keeps the format going online under the banner “Let’s Laff”, posting riddles such as how to get a baby alien to sleep, with the answer “you rocket”.

Where the jokes come from is a question the company has answered. In The Takeout’s 2023 article, Jenny Chen, then brand manager of Laffy Taffy at Ferrara, said the wrapper jokes are “a mix of jokes sent by fans and popular puns crowd-sourced or identified through research”. The article says that in 2022 the brand held a joke-writing contest to add to its internal store of jokes, and that the selected entries joined the pool printed on wrappers. Chen said the jokes must first be family-friendly, and are also judged on originality, humour and fit with the brand’s values.

The jokes have also been used beyond the wrapper. The Takeout says that in October 2023 Laffy Taffy released a limited-edition card game called “The Last Laff”, offered through a giveaway. The article describes the jokes as a brand builder, and the wrapper as something meant to be read before it is torn open.

For a design guide, Laffy Taffy shows how a line of copy repeated on every wrapper can become the brand’s voice. Compare it with Nerds, another former Wonka candy now made under Ferrara, and Airheads, an American fruit taffy sold in a bar. For this guide we use cherry pink and banana yellow with blue raspberry and a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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