From seasonal taffy to a square sold in every season.

Now and Later is a fruit-flavoured, taffy-like candy formed into small squares and wrapped in colourful paper. English Wikipedia describes it that way and says it is made by Ferrara Candy Company and sold in Original, Chewy and Morphs varieties. The name carries its own instruction. A “Fun Facts” page that Ferrara published, archived in September 2013, says the name was meant to suggest that customers could eat some of the candy now and save some for later, and that idea has stayed attached to the brand ever since.

The candy grew out of a Brooklyn taffy business. Wikipedia says Now and Later was created in Brooklyn, New York, in 1962 by the Phoenix Candy Company. A company history published by Farley’s & Sathers, a later owner, and archived in April 2006, gives more of the story. It says that in 1953 Harry and Joseph Klein, a New York father and son, bought an existing candy business, named it Phoenix Candy Company and began making Atlantic City-style salt-water taffy, peanut brittle and Halloween candy. That trade was seasonal: the history says the business worked for only about nine months of the year.

The same history says that in 1962 the Kleins decided they needed a confection they could ship all year round. They brought in vacuum cookers to replace open-fire kettles, which saved time in cooking and cooling, and bought a German-made machine to form and wrap the candy, and with it began production of Now and Later taffy bars. The start was slow. According to Farley’s & Sathers, the machine had been installed incorrectly and ran poorly for around three years, until the company hired a German-speaking plant manager, Joseph Stein, in 1966, who fixed it. After that, the history says, the product began to take off, and in 1970 Phoenix gained national distribution by extending its sales to the West Coast.

Beatrice, Leaf, Nabisco, Kraft, Farley’s & Sathers, Ferrara.

From the late 1970s Now and Later moved through a long chain of owners. The Farley’s & Sathers history and Wikipedia agree on the outline. The Kleins sold Phoenix Candy to Beatrice Foods in 1978; the history notes that Beatrice already owned several other confectionery companies. In 1983 Beatrice sold its confectionery business to Huhtamaki Oy of Finland, which set up Leaf, Inc., based in Bannockburn, Illinois. In January 1986, the history says, Leaf consolidated its candy companies and merged Phoenix with Leaf in Brooklyn, and later that year Leaf sold Phoenix to Kouri Capital, a Finnish investment firm. The company’s name then changed to Phoenix Confections.

In December 1992, according to the same history, Nabisco Foods Group acquired the assets of Phoenix Confections for its LifeSavers division in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wikipedia records the next step through press coverage. The New York Times reported on 26 June 2000 that Nabisco had agreed to be bought by Philip Morris, and Wikipedia says that, as a result, Now and Later became a Kraft Foods brand. In 2002, the private-equity firm Catterton Partners bought a group of confectionery brands from Kraft and Hershey to form Farley’s & Sathers Candy Company; Just Food reported the purchase from Kraft on 21 February 2002, and the Farley’s & Sathers history confirms that Now and Later was part of the deal.

The last move so far came ten years later. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported on 24 May 2012 that Farley’s & Sathers would merge with Ferrara Pan Candy Company of the Chicago area. Wikipedia says the combined business took the name Ferrara Candy Company, and Ferrara has made Now and Later since that merger. The brand’s range has also changed shape over the years. Wikipedia lists a set of twelve flavours that includes apple, banana, cherry and grape, alongside an “original” flavour that it says is also known as pineapple, and its product line now spans the Original squares, a Chewy version and Morphs.

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 name that tells you how to eat it.

The brand’s identity starts with its name. The Ferrara “Fun Facts” page made the point plainly: the name told buyers they could eat some now and keep some for later. The format supports the idea. Wikipedia says the candy is formed into squares and packaged in colourful paper, so each piece is wrapped on its own and the rest of the pack can be closed and kept. The company history from Farley’s & Sathers frames the product the same way from the other side: the Kleins wanted a candy they could sell in every season, not only around holidays, and a small, individually wrapped square of taffy was the answer they built their machines around.

Colour runs through the range. Wikipedia’s flavour list includes apple, banana, blue raspberry, cherry, grape, strawberry, watermelon and tropical punch, and the brand’s own product listings group the range by variety: Original, Chewy and Morphs. The ownership history is long. Now and Later has been handled by a Brooklyn family business, a food conglomerate, a Finnish confectionery group, a Finnish investment firm, Nabisco’s LifeSavers division, Kraft, a private-equity-backed candy company and, since 2012, Ferrara. Across those owners the name has stayed the same.

Wikipedia’s Now and Later article points readers to Starburst as a related candy, and since the 2012 merger Now and Later has shared an owner with Lemonheads. The Phoenix Candy Company that the Kleins named in 1953 made Now and Later in Brooklyn until they sold it to Beatrice Foods in 1978, according to the Farley’s & Sathers history.

For a design guide, Now and Later shows how a product name can double as a usage instruction, and how a small, individually wrapped square and a bright run of flavour colours can hold a brand together across many owners. Compare it with Starburst, another fruit chew wrapped piece by piece, and Lemonheads, a fellow Ferrara candy. For this guide we use cherry red, deep grape, banana yellow and apple green on wrapper white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Now and Later’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.