A New York licorice firm, a merger and a twist.

Twizzlers belong to The Hershey Company, but the business that created them is far older than Hershey’s ownership. Hershey says its roots go back to Young & Smylie, a confectionery business founded in 1845, which makes the Twizzlers maker one of the oldest candy firms in the United States, English Wikipedia says. According to English Wikipedia, the firm adopted Y&S as its trademark in 1870 — the two initials that still name the company behind the candy today.

In 1902, English Wikipedia says, Young & Smylie merged with two other small licorice makers to form the National Licorice Company, which opened a plant in Montreal in 1908. It was under that name that the twist arrived. Hershey says Twizzlers Twists first rolled off the line at the National Licorice Company in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927; English Wikipedia, citing an archived Hershey Canada page, gives the brand’s creation as 1929. Hershey’s consumer site now uses 1927.

Before Twizzlers, the company was known for another shape. English Wikipedia, citing a 1923 advertisement in The Des Moines Register, says National’s Licorice Nibs were on sale in the United States by then in glassine packaging, and that pyramid-and-camel imagery appeared on Nibs packs from the 1930s, according to a United States trademark record, and was used for decades. Nibs are still sold under the Twizzlers name.

The company changed its name to Y&S Candies Inc. in 1968, English Wikipedia says, and by the middle of the 1970s it was a large business. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of September 1975, says Y&S was selling nearly 50 million pounds of licorice products a year, and that it turned that year to a Madison Avenue advertising agency to promote its products separately, so that Twizzlers would stop being confused with Nibs. The Times headline described Twizzlers and Nibs as seeking to resolve an identity crisis.

Strawberry, a hollow twist and a happy mouth.

The flavour most people now associate with Twizzlers is strawberry, and the sources disagree on when it arrived. Hershey says strawberry was the original Twists flavour, introduced in 1927, at a time when licorice-style candies came mostly in black licorice. English Wikipedia, citing The New York Times of 1975, says the original flavour was licorice and that in the middle 1970s the company began to add strawberry, grape, chocolate, cherry and watermelon. Either way, strawberry now dominates: Lancaster’s newspaper LNP reported in 2013 that seventy per cent of annual Twizzlers production was strawberry.

The product’s form is the brand’s most recognisable asset. Hershey says Twists are made by pushing the candy mixture through special rotating nozzles, which give the candy its twist and its hollow centre. Over the years the range has added new shapes around that form. Hershey’s archived brand history dates Pull ’n’ Peel — strands joined side by side that pull apart — to 1994, and Twerpz and Strawz to 2004. Hershey’s current Twizzlers page lists Twists, Pull ’n’ Peel, Filled Bites and Nibs, among others.

Twizzlers advertising has leaned on cheerful lines rather than on a mascot. Television commercials from the 1980s, and a Pull ’n’ Peel spot from 1996, used the line “Twizzlers Makes Mouths Happy.” English Wikipedia gives “The Twist You Can’t Resist” as the brand’s tagline, and in 2026 Hershey’s consumer site introduces the range with “Don’t get it twisted.”

The branding agency Sterling Brands says it reworked the Twizzlers brand in partnership with Hershey’s Strategic Design group. In its case study the agency says the sweets category had been growing and changing quickly while the brand stood still, and that the new design aimed to elevate and activate the brand’s iconic product form — the twist itself. The agency lists brand identity, visual language and packaging among the work it carried out.

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 Hershey brand made in Lancaster and Memphis.

Hershey bought the company in November 1977. Its 2019 investor fact book records that Y&S Candies Inc. of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, “a manufacturer of licorice-type products,” was acquired for 701,982 shares of Hershey common stock in a pooling-of-interests transaction, and that on 5 January 1982 Y&S Candies was merged into The Hershey Company. Twizzlers are still described as being made by Y&S Candies, now a division of Hershey, English Wikipedia says.

Lancaster is the brand’s home. Hershey says the Y&S business opened a new factory there in 1977, and its plant list calls Lancaster “the original Y&S Candies plant,” which makes Twizzlers. Hershey says it produces almost 200 tons of Twizzlers Twists a day in Lancaster, and that a 1,200-foot Twist weighing 100 pounds, made on 19 July 1998, set a Guinness World Record for the longest piece of licorice. The candy is not made in Lancaster alone. English Wikipedia, citing the Albuquerque Journal of January 1999, says Twizzlers were made in Farmington, New Mexico, from 1970 until 1999, when the operation moved to Memphis, Tennessee, because of rising transport costs. Hershey describes its Memphis plant as making gum, mints and licorice, and as the home of the Ice Breakers brand.

Twizzlers also have a rival in another red twist. English Wikipedia, citing SFGate in 2021, says the brand manager of Red Vines, made in California by the American Licorice Company, called the rivalry between the two brands “very fan-driven” and largely regional, with Twizzlers stronger in the East and Northeast. In a 2012 episode of the television comedy Parks and Recreation, characters split over which of the two is better.

For a design guide, Twizzlers shows how a single extruded shape — a hollow, twisted strand — can carry a brand through more than ninety years and a change of owner. Compare Red Vines, the Californian red twist, and Reese’s, another Hershey brand from Pennsylvania. For this guide we use a strawberry red, black licorice and a pull pink with a heavy rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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