Laffy Taffy
The flat fruit taffy with a groaner printed on every wrapper, banana and strawberry and green apple, the joke usually worse than the candy was good. An Illinois candy maker started it in the 1970s; Nestlé's Willy Wonka brand made it a Halloween-bag fixture.
Paul F. Beich bought a confectionery business in Bloomington, Illinois in 1893, built it into the Paul F. Beich Company, and gave the town the Whiz Bar in 1922. In the 1970s the company, by then trading as Kathryn Beich Candies, started selling fruit-flavored taffy squares under the odd name "Beich's Caramels," and some years later renamed them Beich's Laffy Taffy. Beich's descendants ran the factory until 1984, when Nestlé, which had already taken the distribution rights, bought the line and the plant.
Under Nestlé it became a Willy Wonka Candy Company product, the brand launched in May 1971 a month ahead of the first film and acquired by Nestlé through its 1988 purchase of Rowntree Mackintosh, and that purple Wonka logo is the one on the wrappers a 1990s kid remembers. The jokes are a mix of ones sent in by fans and puns turned up by research; the original thick square pieces have since become thinner rectangles, and a two-layer "Flavor Flippers" variant came in 2003. The core flavors are banana, strawberry, green apple, grape, watermelon, blue raspberry and cherry. In 2005 the rap group D4L named a song after it, and "Laffy Taffy" went to number one on the Hot 100 in January 2006 largely on online sales, its video version interpolating New Edition's "Candy Girl."
Ferrero announced on January 18, 2018 that it was buying Nestlé's American candy business for about $2.8 billion, closed the deal that spring, and folded the brands into the Ferrara Candy Company in 2019; the Wonka name went away with the sale. The old Beich building on Lumber Street in Bloomington had already burned in a 2005 arson. In 2022 the brand ran a joke-writing contest, took in 6,500 submissions and picked the top 101 for the wrappers.
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