From ice cream cones to a peppermint that had to snap clean.

The York Peppermint Pattie takes its name from its home town. English Wikipedia says Henry Kessler founded the York Cone Company on South Pine Street in York, Pennsylvania, around 1920, and that it originally sold ice cream cones and waffles before Kessler set out to make a chocolate-and-mint candy. In a post dated 29 July 2009 on the York Daily Record’s history blog York Town Square, Jim McClure reproduced a 1931 York Cone Company invoice for cones, listing an address on South Pine Street, and quoted the York Daily Record columnist Mike Argento, who called the pattie the brainchild of Henry C. Kessler at the York Cone Company, a firm that made ice cream cones from the 1920s.

The candy’s character was firmness. In Argento’s account, as quoted by McClure, Kessler wanted his peppermint to be firm and crisp, unlike other chocolate-covered peppermints of the time, and the pattie made its local debut in 1940; the company later stopped making cones to concentrate on the candy, and sold it across the Northeast and in Florida without advertising. Wikipedia says much the same, and quotes a former employee, Phil Kollin, recalling the final check each sample went through before leaving the factory: a “snap test”, in which a pattie that did not break clean in the middle was counted as a second.

The 1940 date is the one Hershey has used. McClure’s 2009 post copies a chronology then on Hershey’s website: the York Cone Company established in York in the 1920s; York peppermint patties introduced locally in 1940; Peter Paul acquiring the York Cone Company in 1972; national distribution from 1975; Peter Paul merging with Cadbury Schweppes in 1978; and Hershey Foods acquiring Cadbury Schweppes’ US confectionery operations in 1988. Wikipedia adds a different, earlier date: it cites a trademark application for “York Peppermint Pattie Mint (Candy)” filed by the York Cone Company in February 1949, which gave January 1922 as the date the mark was used in commerce, with registration granted in September 1952.

Peter Paul, Cadbury Schweppes, Hershey.

The pattie stayed a regional candy until a larger confectioner bought its maker. Wikipedia and McClure’s chronology agree that Peter Paul acquired the York Cone Company in 1972 and took York Peppermint Patties national in 1975. Peter Paul in turn merged with the British group Cadbury Schweppes in 1978. A history-of-candy post published by a Penn State student blog on 14 March 2019 repeats the same sequence: York Cone Company bought by Peter Paul in 1972, national launch three years later, and Hershey from 1988.

Wikipedia says that in August 1988 The Hershey Company acquired the US confectionery operations of Cadbury Schweppes, a business that included Almond Joy, Mounds and York Peppermint Pattie, together with licensing arrangements for certain Cadbury brands in the United States. Hershey has owned York since 1988, and today sells it alongside Reese’s in its US candy range; Hershey’s consumer site, Hersheyland, keeps a York brand page.

Production has long been away from York itself. Wikipedia says the patties were made at Hershey’s plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, for 23 years. An Associated Press report dated 20 February 2009, carried by cleveland.com, said Hershey was closing the Reading plant and moving production of York Peppermint Patties, along with 5th Avenue and Zagnut bars and Jolly Rancher hard candies, to a new factory it had built in Mexico; the report said the closure was part of a wider restructuring Hershey had announced two years earlier. McClure added an update to his York post on 19 March 2010, noting that the wrapper of a bite-size pattie he picked up at a conference in Hershey read “Mfd. in Mexico for The Hershey Company”.

Design and documentation.

The candies in this group are American sweets whose identity lives on the outside of the pack. A candy brand’s look is carried by small, cheap and much-handled things: a twist wrapper in a single strong colour, a paper roll of identical pieces, a narrow cardboard box sized for a cinema counter, or a bar wrapper read in a second at a checkout.

Wrapper colour often signals a flavour before any words are read, and a roll pack or theatre box can become as recognisable as the name printed on it. Some wrappers carry more than a name, with jokes, riddles or slogans printed where a label would usually sit, so the packaging becomes part of the product.

Many American candy names have also outlived the companies that created them, passing between owners over the decades while keeping their names and packs. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the candy, who owns it now, where it is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A town name, a snap and a cool slogan.

The brand’s name does much of its work: the candy is called after a place, and for years the place made it. The York Daily Record’s Mike Argento, quoted on York Town Square, put it in a phrase: York became synonymous with dark chocolate and peppermint, and a pattie was not just any peppermint pattie but a York Peppermint Pattie. Hershey’s own copy, as quoted by McClure in 2009, leaned on coolness and distance, describing the cool, refreshing taste of mint dipped in dark chocolate as something that would take the eater “miles away”.

The advertising line that has lasted is “Get the Sensation”. Wikipedia says Peter Paul launched an advertising campaign with that tagline during the 1970s, that a 1979 television commercial used the “Get the Sensation” theme, and that the line remains in use. Wikipedia also says that in the autumn of 1982 Peter Paul ran a campaign built on an “I Love New York” theme to promote more chocolate in the candy, citing a New York Times advertising column from September 1982 on a new York campaign by the Dancer agency.

Around the core pattie, Hershey has added seasonal shapes and formats. Wikipedia lists a Chocolate Truffle Mint introduced in 2004, York Peppermint Bites in 2003, York Mints in a tin in 2007, and holiday patties shaped as hearts for Valentine’s Day, pumpkins for Halloween, snowflakes for Christmas and eggs and bunnies for Easter; the 2004 truffle patties and the 2007 tin also appear in the Hershey chronology McClure copied in 2009. Wikipedia notes, too, that Charles M. Schulz introduced a Peanuts character named Peppermint Patty on 22 August 1966, and that National Peppermint Patty Day is marked on 11 February.

For a design guide, York Peppermint Pattie shows how a town name, a crisp texture and a cool slogan can carry a candy from a cone factory to national shelves while production moves elsewhere. Compare it with Reese’s, another Pennsylvania candy in the Hershey stable, and Altoids, a mint sold on its strength. For this guide we use midnight blue and foil silver on mint white with dark chocolate and a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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