From wedding almonds on Taylor Street to a sour panned candy.

Lemonheads came out of a Chicago family business built on panned sugar. English Wikipedia’s article on the Ferrara Candy Company says Salvatore Ferrara emigrated from Nola to New York in 1900 and in 1908 opened a bakery on Taylor Street in Chicago’s Little Italy with his brother-in-law, Salvatore Lezza, selling candy-coated almonds known as “confetti”, a treat at Italian weddings. Lezza had learned to pan candy in Italy and taught the trade to Ferrara. The relatives later split the business, Wikipedia says, with Lezza keeping the bakery and Ferrara the candy. Ferrara partnered with two more brothers-in-law, Salvatore Buffardi and Anello Pagano, and built a two-storey brick building where revolving kettles on the upper floor produced the candy.

The candy itself is a family story. The Chicago Tribune, in an article published on 3 December 2014, says that family patriarch Nello Ferrara created Lemonheads and Atomic FireBalls at Ferrara Pan Candy Co., and that he developed Lemonheads in 1962, saying he got the idea after his son, Salvatore Ferrara II, was born by forceps with a head shaped like a lemon. The newspaper quotes Salvatore’s daughter, Alana Ferrara, retelling the joke: “My son’s head looks like a lemon.” The Tribune describes the founding Salvatore Ferrara as the grandfather of Salvatore II, and says Salvatore II joined the company in the mid-1970s and later became its chief executive.

Wikipedia describes the candy as round and lemon-flavoured, with a sweet coating, a soft, sour shell and a hard candy core. It was made, Wikipedia says, by the same cold panned process as the company’s Red Hots, in which layer after layer of sugar and flavour is added until the candy reaches the desired shape and size. Wikipedia gives the standard size as about one centimetre, with a single-sale three-centimetre version.

Ferrara Pan, Ferrara Candy, Ferrero.

For half a century Lemonheads belonged to a family firm in the Chicago suburbs. The Chicago Tribune in December 2014 describes Ferrara Pan Candy Co. as based in Forest Park, maker of Boston Baked Beans, Red Hots and Jaw Busters, and says Salvatore II oversaw its acquisition of Black Forest Gummy Bears. In 2012, the Tribune says, Ferrara Pan merged with Farley’s & Sathers Candy Co., and the combined business, known as the Ferrara Candy Company, was based in Oakbrook Terrace. Wikipedia says the deal was arranged by the private equity firm Catterton Partners, owner of Farley’s & Sathers, and that the new company was placed under Salvatore Ferrara II as chief executive. The merger brought Lemonheads together with Farley’s & Sathers names such as Brach’s, Chuckles, Jujyfruits and Now and Later.

The next owner came from Europe. In a release dated 18 October 2017, issued from Luxembourg and Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, the Ferrero Group announced a definitive agreement under which a Ferrero-affiliated company would acquire the Ferrara Candy Company from L Catterton; terms were not disclosed. Wikipedia says the acquisition was completed in December 2017, so Ferrero has owned Lemonheads through Ferrara since 2017. Wikipedia adds that in 2018 Ferrero bought Nestlé’s US candy business and handed most of those brands to Ferrara, among them Butterfinger, Baby Ruth and former Willy Wonka hard candies such as Spree.

The company’s address has moved with it. Wikipedia says Ferrara announced in 2019 that it was moving its world headquarters to Chicago, and gives the headquarters as the Old Post Office in downtown Chicago, with manufacturing plants in the United States and Mexico.

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 family of heads and a mascot that grew up.

The name became a system. Wikipedia says that at some point between the 1980s and the late 1990s, Ferrara Pan brought its fruit-flavoured candies under one naming convention: Lemonheads, Grapeheads (formerly Alexander the Grape), Cherryheads (formerly Cherry Chan) and Appleheads (formerly Johnny Apple Treats). Wikipedia lists many later spin-offs, from Chewy Lemonheads and Friends to Lemonhead Ropes, and says that today only the standard Lemonhead variety of the original panned candies remains.

Advertising grew out of the company’s home city. Wikipedia says Ferrara Pan, as a Chicago company, was a prominent sponsor of The Bozo Show on WGN-TV, with Lemonheads promoted on air and gift packs of Ferrara Pan candy given as prizes. In the 1980s, Wikipedia says, Lemonhead commercials centred on children’s sports teams, in which the player who made a mistake was labelled the “lemonhead”; in the 2010s the ads paired the Lemonhead mascot with athletes.

The mascot itself was redrawn in 2014. The Los Angeles Times reported on 21 May 2014, citing the Chicago Tribune, that Lemonhead candies were undergoing a rebrand with new packaging and a new mascot. The paper described the previous character as an illustrated child with a bow tie and a patch of hair, and the new one as an almost-real young man with a giant lemon head, blue eyes, ears and hair, aged into his early twenties to appeal to an older audience. The Times said the brand had also given him a social-media presence; the redesign drew mockery online.

For a design guide, Lemonheads shows how a family joke can turn into a name, a naming system and a mascot, and how a brand can try to age its character along with its audience. Compare it with Nerds, another candy now under Ferrara, and Now and Later, which joined it through Farley’s & Sathers. For this guide we use lemon yellow, box red and sky blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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