From a Manhattan candy firm to a South Side plant.

Tootsie Roll began inside an older New York candy business. English Wikipedia’s article on Tootsie Roll Industries says that in 1896 Leo Hirschfield, an Austrian Jewish immigrant to the United States, began work at a small candy shop in New York City owned by the Stern & Saalberg firm. Wikipedia’s article on the candy names the owners as Julius Stern and Jacob Saalberg, and notes that the company’s own history spells the founder’s name “Hirshfield”. It adds that details of his early career are disputed: one version has him opening a candy shop in Brooklyn that later merged with Stern & Saalberg, another has him starting at the factory and rising to a senior post.

The candy itself dates to 1907. Wikipedia says Hirschfield completed it after patenting a technique to give it its texture, and that he named it after his daughter Clara, whose nickname was “Tootsie”. Wikipedia says Tootsie Rolls went on sale commercially in September 1908. Wikipedia describes the result as a chocolate taffy with qualities similar to both caramels and taffy without being exactly either. The company’s website, as quoted by Wikipedia, says the original recipe calls for the inclusion of the previous day’s batch, “a graining process that Tootsie continues to this day.”

The firm around the candy changed its name more than once. Wikipedia says the business became The Sweets Company of America in 1917, around the time founders Stern and Saalberg retired, and was reformed and listed on the American Stock Exchange in 1919. Hirschfield, who had become vice-president, left in 1920 and started a new venture, Mells Candy. In 1931, Wikipedia says, the company introduced the Tootsie Pop, a hard-candy lollipop with a Tootsie Roll centre.

Rubin, Gordon and a move to Chicago.

The decisive change of control came through a supplier. Wikipedia says that in 1935 the company was in serious difficulty, and that its principal supplier of paper boxes, Joseph Rubin & Sons of Brooklyn, concerned about losing an important customer, set out to acquire it. Bernard D. Rubin obtained a list of shareholders and approached them in person to buy their shares; the Rubin family eventually gained control and agreed that Bernard would run the company as president. Wikipedia says he changed the formula of the Tootsie Roll, increased its size and moved production from Manhattan to a larger plant in Hoboken, New Jersey. During the Second World War, Wikipedia says, Tootsie Rolls became part of American soldiers’ field rations because the candy held up under a range of conditions.

Leadership then stayed in the family. Wikipedia says Bernard’s brother William B. Rubin became president and served until 1962, when William’s daughter Ellen Rubin Gordon took control; her husband Melvin Gordon was chairman and chief executive for many years, and Ellen Gordon has held that role since January 2015. The company adopted the name Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. in 1966 and moved its headquarters to Chicago in 1968. Wikipedia places the headquarters on the city’s South Side, in part of the former Dodge Chicago Plant, where most of the company’s candy is produced, and lists further factories in Mexico City, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Spain.

Around the original roll, the company bought a run of other American candy names. Wikipedia lists the Mason division of the Candy Corporation of America in 1972, Cella’s Confections in 1985, the Charms Company in 1988, Warner-Lambert’s candy division in 1993, Andes Candies in 2000 and Concord Confections in 2004. The Warner-Lambert purchase brought the Junior Mints line into the group; see the Junior Mints guide. On 2 December 2009 the Orthodox Union announced that Tootsie Rolls, Tootsie Fruit Rolls, Frooties and DOTS had been certified kosher, and that new packaging carrying the “OU” symbol would be distributed nationwide.

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 comic-strip captain and a jingle.

Tootsie Roll’s advertising has leaned on characters and songs. Wikipedia says Captain Tootsie, an advertising comic strip, was created for Tootsie Rolls in 1943 by C. C. Beck and Pete Costanza, with Bill Schreider joining from 1950. The captain had a sidekick, a boy named Rollo, and a small band of young friends; the feature ran as full-colour one-page Sunday strips, black-and-white daily strips and two issues of a comic book of the same title from Toby Press. Wikipedia says the strip ads ended in the 1950s, and that in 2019 the writer and artist Erik Larsen used Captain Tootsie as one of several public-domain characters in his Savage Dragon series.

A later campaign was musical. Wikipedia says the jingle “Whatever It Is I Think I See” was recorded at Blank Tape Studios in New York in 1976 and aired on television regularly for more than twenty years, mostly during Saturday-morning cartoons; its closing solo runs “Whatever it is I think I see becomes a Tootsie Roll to me.” Wikipedia cites a 1996 letter from Tootsie Roll Industries for the recording’s history.

Wikipedia says Tootsie Fruit Chews were introduced in the 1970s as Tootsie Roll Flavor Rolls, and that cherry, orange, vanilla, lemon and lime are wrapped in pink, orange, blue, yellow and green wrappers respectively, with specialty flavours in darker greens, blues and purples. The Orthodox Union’s 2009 announcement shows how a certification mark can itself become part of a pack: the company said new packaging bearing the “OU” symbol would roll out across the country within weeks.

For a design guide, Tootsie Roll shows how a candy named after one family’s daughter can carry the same name through more than a century of owners, factories and wrappers, with a script name, a twist of paper and a jingle doing the work of a brand book. Compare it with Junior Mints, a stablemate under the same Chicago owner, and Red Vines, another long-running American chew. For this guide we use chew brown, wrapper red and wax-paper white with a script display, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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