A Jaret confectioner, a space-age name and a Canadian plant.

Sour Patch Kids did not start life under that name. When the candy maker Frank Galatolie of Valley Stream, New York, died in 2016, CBS New York reported that he was credited with creating the sweet-and-sour candy, originally known as “Mars Men,” in the early 1970s, while working as a confectioner at Jaret International, and that it was rebranded as Sour Patch Kids in the mid-1980s. Mental Floss, writing in 2015, called Jaret a Canadian candy company, placed the candy’s creation in the late 1970s and said the original name was meant to cash in on the popularity of UFOs; the two accounts differ on the decade.

The new name came with a new market. According to Mental Floss, the candy was exported to the United States in 1985, and marketers renamed it with an eye on another craze of the time, the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. English Wikipedia gives 1985 as the brand’s American introduction and the 1970s as its start in Canada.

The Canadian side of the story runs through one building in Hamilton, Ontario. Mondelēz International’s own history of its Hamilton plant says that in 1964 Jaret and the Swedish liquorice maker Malaco imported confections from Sweden for distribution in North America, and that in 1978 a company it calls M&A acquired the Hamilton site, where the Sour Patch Kids brand was developed. That makes Sour Patch Kids a near neighbour of Swedish Fish, the Malaco gummy that came to America the same way and is still made in the same plant.

Allan Candy, Cadbury, Kraft and Mondelēz.

Ownership then passed through a chain of larger companies, which Mondelēz sets out in its own timeline for the Hamilton plant. In 1991 Allan Candy bought M&A. In 1995 Cadbury Schweppes, the British confectionery and drinks group, bought Allan Candy. Cadbury Schweppes went on to buy the gum and mint business Adams from Pfizer, a deal it completed in March 2003 for $4.2 billion, according to its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and its American confectionery arm took the name Cadbury Adams. In 2010 Kraft Foods bought Cadbury, and in 2012 the Hamilton plant joined Mondelēz International, the snacks company split off from Kraft that year.

Hamilton is still where the candy is made. Mondelēz says the plant makes Maynards Wine Gums, Sour Patch Kids, Swedish Fish and Swedish Berries, and calls it the largest-volume producer of starch-moulded products in its network. In October 2019 Mondelēz Canada completed a C$40 million expansion there: Global News reported about 50 new jobs and a workforce of 350, and Just Food reported a new line for the Maynards brand able to make 11 million pieces a day for customers in the United States and Canada, with 40 kinds of confectionery made on the site. Martin Parent, president of Mondelēz Canada, told Global News that the upgrade would let the plant make “millions and millions more pieces” a day, and that candy “requires a lot of effort in ensuring it is made consistently.”

The brand has also been stretched well beyond the bag. A sugar-free Sour Patch Kids gum was announced in December 2013, ConfectioneryNews reported; in 2011 Capcom published a Sour Patch Kids video game, World Gone Sour; in 2018 Post released a Sour Patch Kids cereal, which The Washington Post reviewed that December; and in May 2024 Mondelēz’s own Oreo brand released Sour Patch Kids Oreos, with coloured sour sugar in the biscuit and the filling, TODAY reported. In 2018, The Daily Meal reported, Dreyer’s also sold a Sour Patch Kids ice cream and J&J Snack Foods a range of Sour Patch Kids ice pops.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make sugar candy, and all of them are sold as American brands: Sour Patch Kids, Swedish Fish, Twizzlers, Red Vines, Airheads, Nerds and Warheads. American candy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names still tied to a single family firm to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a gas-station counter to a cinema concession stand.

A candy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single sweet than by a pack, a name, a colour and sometimes a character, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its candy is actually made and packed.

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

A sour coat, a sweet centre and a kid with his tongue out.

The product idea is simple: a soft gummy coated in a sour sugar. English Wikipedia, citing the food scientists Richard and AnnaKate Hartel’s 2014 book Candy Bites, describes the coating as a mix of sugar with citric and tartaric acids over a gummy sweetened with invert sugar, and says an Extreme version adds malic acid. The brand turns that sequence into its message. Its American website, run by Mondelēz under the Snackworks name, opens with “Sour. Sweet. Gone.” and the line “First they’re sour. Then they’re sweet.”; English Wikipedia also records the slogan “Sour Then Sweet.”

The pack has long carried a character, the Sour Patch Kid. Mental Floss reported in 2015 that the blond boy on the packaging was modelled on Scott, the son of Frank Galatolie, whom it describes as a partner in Jaret; he was usually shown with his tongue sticking out, later wore a baseball cap, and was redesigned in 1992.

Today the brand sits in Mondelēz’s confectionery business alongside Swedish Fish, and both are made in the same Hamilton plant for the American and Canadian markets.

For a design guide, Sour Patch Kids shows how a renamed product can build a whole identity around a two-stage taste and a cheeky mascot. Compare Swedish Fish, made in the same Hamilton plant, and Maynards Bassetts, the Mondelēz name its Hamilton wine gums carry. For this guide we use sour yellow, lime, cherry red and a deep blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sour Patch Kids’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.