Starting in the ’70s, the Reese’s line diversified, and the branding started before we ever called it that. Reese made other candies too, but the cups are what persisted, and remained the flagship, even after Hershey acquired the company in 1963. This data - as learned from appropriately named trade magazine Candy Industry - is offered to demonstrate that nothing manufactured and sold is so magical, not even candy, as to avoid being an “industry,” a word which evokes all kinds of things, all antithetical to candy. In North America, the global confectionary industry pulled in $35.4 billion, and has expanded by 6% from 2005 to 2010. The subsectors of the confectionary industry include chocolate, non-chocolate, gum and snack/cookie/cracker products, which is apropos of nothing, but I do love a good subsector. Goodbars and other candies being introduced. The 1920s was an active decade for what we now think of as the candy industry (or, the confectionary industry, as it is known), with Baby Ruths, Heath Bars, Milk Duds, Mr. Reese first sold the cups in 1920s, in Hershey, PA, using Hershey’s chocolate. The whole is greater than the parts, which is the mystery at the heart of candy bars, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in specific.Įven with an informal survey like this one, which has been narrowed down to a single candy, it’s still not so easy to pin a historical trend down, as the cup is not the only chocolate/peanut butter delivery system that has been utilized by Reese’s.

I can’t be the only person who, back then, decided to mix chocolate chips with peanut butter out of a jar to see if I could fake a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, and found that, while not terrible, it was nothing like the real thing. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup experience does not purely consist of a young woman walking down the street eating peanut butter out of a jar, and a young man walking the other direction, chocolate bar in front of him like, um, a dowsing rod. You may remember the tagline from the 1970s and early ’80s, “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” This was a bit misleading. To measure relative prices through the decades, let’s stick with one representative candy: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Now, 30 years later, with childhood more perilous than ever (what with the confusion over the aims of Occupy Wall Street, and the sexting), is candy still a tiny luxury, or are manufacturers of candy leveraging candy’s comfort into a gold-like inflation? Are even our children not safe from the predatory aspects of the free-market economy? Surely no corporation would be so Snidely Whiplash as to exploit little kids for profit, but let’s investigate anyway.

When I was ten I’d bike down to the Open Pantry, and if there was allowance left over after comic books, I’d grab a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup for a quarter (and, if in a shrewd frame of mind, not eat it directly but throw it in the freezer back home). Candy is at all times dandy, and all of us can testify to that: we were children once, and young. “Candy may be dandy…” Actually, that is not true.

10 cents now and later candy