After 26 years, Sweets & Snacks Expo leaves Chicago, bringing with it a century of wacko candy names
The Candy Show, also known as the National Confectioners Association annual trade meeting, officially known as the Sweets & Snacks Expo, has been a staple of McCormick Place for 26 years. All the big hitters show up — Hershey, Hostess, Dippin’ Dots, Jelly Belly — trailing costumed mascots such as Twinkie The Kid and rubbing sugary shoulders with not-quite-household brands, including Pickle-in-a-Pouch and BobbySue’s Nuts.
But all is not sunshine and gumdrops in Candy Land.
Next year, Sweets & Snacks will be relocating to Indianapolis, then later Las Vegas. Exponential growth coupled with a lack of space is the NCA’s primary reason. Yet it’s not only $21 million in hotel rooms, restaurant tabs and convention rentals that Chicago is losing. It’s also 16,000 candy professionals from around the world, showcasing a gob-stopping number of chips, gummies, jerkies, chocolates and cookies. It’s bragging rights: As the home of Wrigley Gum, Snickers, Cracker Jack and Tootsie Rolls, Chicago has had a birthright to snacks for a century; to this day, of course, large swaths of downtown still smell like fresh chocolate and sweets.
Less obvious, however, is that Chicago will be losing a veritable Linguisticpalooza, a yearly lesson in product naming and a living study in the power of totally stupid names.
Take Ellia Kassoff, resident of California, king of farts.
His name is just fine. But as CEO of Leaf Brands, provider of Wacky Wafers, Hydrox cookies and Astro Pops, he made a splash here several years ago when he created Farts candy. He now has Sour Farts, Bag O’ Dog Farts, and, for the health conscious, Natural Farts. He trademarked “Farts,” so if you plan to make a food item called Farts in any fashion, expect a cease and desist. Kassoff believes candy names should be fun, not flatulent. Leaf is not a fun name, but there’s history there: Leaf began in Chicago in the 1920s and sold to Hershey’s, but not before making Whoppers, Jolly Ranchers and Milk Duds, and becoming one of the biggest candy companies in the world. In 2011, Kassoff, a part of the family that owned Leaf, relaunched it, partly to “bring back the childhood candies I missed.” Which also meant rebooting a practice of crazy names.
Not everyone appreciates this: Until Kassoff’s rabbi stepped in to plead his case, the Orthodox Union Kosher certification agency refused to give its stamp to candy Farts.
Naming a treat is about inspiration and tenacity.
Aytur Aksu, of Hoboken, New Jersey, was at Sweets & Snacks with Just the Fun Part, a new item that is basically the ends of ice cream cones filled with chocolate. “There is intense pressure to find the right name. And ‘Just the Bottom’ was not it. One day on the treadmill, it came to me: I jumped off, wrote it down. I wanted that image of ice cream running down your arm and that last satisfying bite. ... The name should say all of that.”
Which is partly why he’s furious with another new company named Just the Tip, which makes a very similar candy — but with a little bit o’ sex. He’s planning to sue them soon.
Cone tips were a big trend here, but wacko names are forever, a practice as old as the snack industry. You forget that you walk among Goobers, Airheads and Ding Dongs.
“The most important candy brands in this country are very old and ingrained in all of us,” said Evan Brock, vice president of marketing at Spangler Candy, the Ohio-based candy maker of Necco wafers, Dum-Dums and many others. “We take for granted that most of these candies have been in existence more than 60 years. Skittles (first made in this country by Wrigley in 1982) is actually new. We do Bit-O-Honey — 1924. Necco is from 1847.”
They also make Circus Peanuts.
“We would not want to change (that name),” Brock said.
OK, then how about Dum-Dums? Kinda problematic for 2023, no?
“No. Changing it would be a marketing disaster.”
The Sweets & Snacks Expo gives annual innovation awards in categories such as chocolate, gum, meat and novelty. But look closer: The names of products divide into genres too. Many promise fun. Hostess, here with new chocolate cakes called Kazbars, considers “fun, whimsical names are a huge part of the snack cake industry,” said chief customer officer Arist Mastorides. “You want your name to suggest a moment of joy.”
Not far from the Hostess booth was Mooosh, “cotton candy dietary fibers.” Also, Vidal offered Missing Body Parts for Halloween. Tootsie Roll Industries had Wack-O-Wax and Nik-L-Nip (tiny juice bottles). Squire Boone Village of Indiana had Dilophosaurus Spit. Not to be outdone: there were Chunk Nibbles, Suckerpunch pickles, Wowza popcorn.
The umbrella companies responsible for such playfulness often take blah names such as Mondelēz International (a Chicago-based spinoff of Kraft, and home of Oreos and Sour Patch Kids); and Atkinson (not to be confused with the Atkins diet) makes Mary Janes (not to be confused with marijuana). Peeps, on the other hand, come from a century-old Pennsylvania company named Just Born; its logo used to be an infant on a weigh scale.
Some candy names are dares.
A couple decades ago, Candy Dynamics of Carmel, Indiana, a candy resale business, created Toxic Waste, a sour candy that comes in a plastic oil drum. The company founder asked Mark Gagen, now its creative director, to “give me a candy so sour only a kid would eat it.” The “Toxic Waste” name, Gagen said, was “a forbidden fruit.” Toxic Waste became a hit millennial staple; now the company’s motif is industrial sewage.
There are also onomatopoeia names: Oh, Snap! Pickles of Appleton, Wisconsin, which was founded by sauerkraut makers, wanted a name to offer the sound of eating its products.
There are extremely direct names: One snack brand was named You Need This Snack. Though Beer Nuts sometimes refers to snacks similar to Beer Nuts, the Beer Nuts company is actually a downstate Bloomington institution, dating back almost 90 years.
Lifestyle names are huge.
You know what to expect from the RXBAR A.M., a nutrition bar from Kellogg (which bought the Chicago company in 2017). You can picture a REV or BUILT protein bar by name alone. Prevail Jerky sounds like a perfect snack for a doomsday prepper. Partake Foods, a gentle-sounding New York cookie company, was founded for allergy-minded children.
But Unbound Snacks is a bit less obvious. It’s a walnut business near Sacramento. Anjali Bhatti, a third-generation co-owner, said her father noticed walnuts were not getting the high-end treatment. So he picked Unbound. “Our name,” she said, “is more than a name. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a way of reminding people that they should live lives unbound and free.”
Again, they sell walnuts.
Branding and marketing agencies have a hand in many names. One of several seaweed snacks here was Nora, which is made with South Korean seaweed, gets its name from the Japanese word for dried seaweed (nori) and is sold by a company in the Philippines. “Nora” was chosen from 100 options offered by a Chicago branding firm. As Christopher Gindlesperger, senior vice president of public affairs and communications for NCA, noted: “Some of these companies are the most sophisticated in the world when it comes to naming products and flavor profiles, so by the time their product reaches its final form, they invested a significant amount of research and development.”
That is probably why one of the most persistent trends seen at Sweets & Snacks this year was cross-brand mashups: Sprite-flavored Tic Tacs, Dr Pepper-flavored Peeps.
One familiar name is cool. Two, presumably, is twice as nice.
Sometimes, though, circumstance dictates a name: Chew F.O. makes the perfect name for a cookie business founded in a state full of lunatics (Florida). Dam Tasty Beavers, a chocolate treat made in Canada, was created by a Vancouver musician named Jimmy Zee. The name came from a conversation with his chocolate maker. “He told me to think hedgehogs. I told him everyone is doing hedgehogs, so then he said, ‘Well, wait, Jimmy, I do have this beaver mold ...’” That was one year ago. Now the world has Dam Tasty Rasta Beavers (with hemp) and Saturday Night Beavers (maple almond cream truffle).
Of course, proper names are as ubiquitous as the goofy ones. More than 35 years since Reggie Jackson played Major League Baseball, there is still a REGGIE! candy bar. Pearson Ranch Jerky of New Mexico sounds straightforward, but consider the history:
Pearson co-owner Yvette Roney’s family previously owned the land that Pearson Ranch now sits on. Her husband, the founder of Pearson Ranch Jerky, comes from the family that took over that land and established Pearson Ranch in the 1950s. She didn’t know this when they got married. Sounds like “Tudors”/”Games of Thrones”-esque machinations.
“Actually ...” she laughed: Her husband is a Cromwell, as in those Cromwells.
And you thought a name was just a name.
