Bubble Gum or Chewing Gum

Bubble gum is a type of chewing gum with a particular flavor that is especially designed for blowing bubbles. 


Inventor of the first bubble gum was Frank Fleer. In the early 1900s, Frank Fleer experimented with a lot of gum ingredients to find perfect bubble gum recipe. His first bubble gum recipes were never sold, because bubble gums were just too sticky!


Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia had been searching for years to produce a formula allowed bubbles to be blown that didn't stick. In 1928 Walter Diemer, an accountant for the Fleer gum company, while testing new gum recipes, noticed that mass was less sticky than regular chewing gum, and while testing it he found out that he can create bubbles easily . Walter Diemer accidentally founded best recipes for bubble gum. Diemer brought his discovery to a grocery store to test it. All the gum was sold in a single day!


Diemer's Bubble gum was the first ever commercially sold bubble gum. The Fleer Chewing Gum Company began making bubble gum using Diemer's recipe. The gum was named and marketed as "Dubble Bubble" gum. This gum was different from all the other gums.


Fleer Chewing Gum Company trained people to teach others to blow bubbles using the gum. These “blowing teachers” taught the people how to blow bubbles using the gum. Blowing teachers proved the perfect success for Fleer Company.


When Frank H. Fleer founded bubble gum it was the first times that food coloring used. The only food coloring in the factory was pink. Walter Diemer used this color. That is reason why bubble gum was pink, and ever since then, no one thought to change it. Pink became, and remains, the industry standard.


For many years the Dubble Bubble gum was the only bubble gum on the market.


In 1938, four Shorin brothers started a company in Brooklyn called the Topps Chewing Gum. At the end of Word War II, Topps Company started manufacturing bubble gums. They introduced the Bazooka Bubble Gum named after the musical instrument. The gum had "Bazooka Joe" comic strips on the gum wrapper. In 1952, the Topps Company started replacing their previous gift, with a baseball card. Children were especially interesting in Bazooka Joe baseball cards. The Topps Company decided to make card focusing exclusively on America's pastime.

As the time passed, on the market appeared different bubble gum like BubbleYum, Bubblicious and Hubba Bubba. Those bubble gums were non-stick and had the advent of super-soft.

In the years that followed bubble gum conserved popularity.

Chocolate Facts

#01 Cacao is a tree, native to South America, whose seeds are the source of cocoa and chocolate.

#02 Botanists believe that cacao trees grew wild in the Amazon region , however, the use of the cacao tree, for culinary purposes, did not begin until it reached the lush tropical lowlands of southern Mexico over 3000 years ago.

#03 The oldest known civilization of the Americas (1500 - 400 B.C.), The Olmecs, were probably the first users of cacao.Though few records survived, recent linguistic findings suggest the word "cacao" is derived from the word Kakawa in Mixe-Zoquean, believed to have been their language.

#04 Cacao beans were so valuable in ancient Mexico that the Maya and subsequent Aztec and Toltec civilizations used them as a means of currency to pay for commodities and taxes. The Aztecs, and other ancient indigenous cultures, believed chocolate to be an aphrodisiac.  Although this is not exactly true, chocolate does contain phenyl ethylamine (PEA) which creates a chemical reaction in the brain similar to that of falling in love.

#05 In the 17th Century, the first recorded case of “Death by Chocolate” occurred. 

• In San Cristobal de las Casa, in Chiapas, Mexico, upper class Spaniards were so addicted to chocolate intake that they refused a church dictated ban forbidding consumption of drink or food during Mass.
• In response, the townspeople refused to uphold this edict and chose to attend worship services in Convents. The Bishop of Chiapas, who passed the edict, was found dead due to a mixture of poison that was secretly added to his daily cup of chocolate.  Rumor has it that he passed from this world with a smile on his face.

#06 Cocoa, a rare and expensive commodity, had been introduced in Central Europe via Spain as early as the 1600’s but it wasn’t until 1765 that the first chocolate factory was established in the United States. Chocolate was such as a prestigious luxury that the French Ruler, Louis XIV, also known as the “Sun King”, established a court position entitled Royal Chocolate Maker to the King.

#07 The French Leader Napoleon insisted that wine, from the Burgundy vineyard called Chambertin, as well as chocolate be available during military campaigns. Due to its precious nature, the distribution of chocolate was limited to himself and his senior military advisors.

#08 In 1765, the company, Walter Baker Chocolate, was founded by Dr. James Baker and his chocolate maker John Hannon, in a converted wooden mill on the banks of the Neponset River in Massachusetts and thus the term “Baking Chocolate” came into being.

#09  In 1828, cocoa in a powdered format became widely available. This allowed chocolate to become mass produced and widely available during Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth (19th) century. 
#10 In 1849 during the “Gold Rush” of San Francisco, Dominbro Ghirardelli of Italy began making chocolate. His original factory still stands at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, CA.

#11 In 1868, a Parisian named Etienne Guittard arrived in California and started the Guittard Chocolate Company which is still in operation.

#12 1871 was a landmark year for American Chocolate as Milton Hershey, at the age of nineteen (19), founded his company in Pennsylvania.
#13 In 1875, Milk Chocolate was introduced. After over eight (8) years of experimentation, Daniel Peter of Switzerland created this concoction. He sold his creation to his neighbor, Henri Nestle, and thus Nestle Chocolate came into being.
#14 In 1879, Rodolphe Lindt, the founder of Lindt Chocolates, invented the process of “Conching” which is used to refine chocolate thus enhancing it’s quality.

#15 In 1896, the recipe for chocolate brownies, an American snack food staple, was introduced in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

#16 In 1907, the iconic Milk Chocolate Hershey's Kisses were introduced. They are one of the most successful chocolates and Hershey produces approximately 20-25 million per day in a variety of flavors.

#17 In 1913, a process was invented by a Swiss Confectioner named Jules Sechaud that allowed chocolates to have unique fillings.

#18 The original 3 Musketeers Bar of the 1930s had three parts: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.

#19 In 1938, Nestle Crunch was introduced. It was the first chocolate bar to combine milk chocolate and crunchy crisps to create a sensory eating experience that blended taste, texture and sound. 
#20 In 1939, Nestle introduced Chocolate Chips. It became all chocolate in the 1940s and the formula remains the same to this very day.

#21 During the Second World War, the U.S. Government commissioned Milton Hershey to create a candy bar to be included in soldier’s rations.  The candy bar chosen was the famous Hershey Milk Chocolate Bar.

So successful was this collaboration, Hershey Chocolate was called upon during the Persian Gulf War to create a chocolate bar that could withstand high temperatures. The “Desert Bars” were included in the soldier’s daily rations and were also sold to consumers for use in survival kits.#22 In 1960, Chocolate syrup was used to simulate blood in the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “Psycho”. The scene, featuring Janet Leigh, took over seven (7) days to shoot.

• The U.S. produces more chocolate than any other country but the Swiss consume the most, followed closely by the English.
• Americans eat an average of twenty two (22) pounds of candy each year, or approximately 2.8 BILLION pounds annually, split almost equally between candy and chocolate. That is far less than most Europeans consume. 
• The Midwest and the Northeast consume more candy per region than the South, Southwest, West or Mid-Atlantic states. 
• The American palette prefers milk chocolate, approximately ninety two (92) percent, but dark chocolate's popularity is growing rapidly. 
• American chocolate manufacturers use about 1.5 billion pounds of milk only surpassed by the cheese and ice cream industries. They also consume approximately 3,500,000 pounds of whole milk.
• Chocolate manufacturers currently use forty (40) % of the world's almonds and twenty (20) % of the world's peanuts. 
• As of 2006, consumers spent more than $7,000,000 a year on chocolate related products. 

Source : candyfavorites.com

The History of Lollipop Candy

The first incarnation of the lollipop was probably created by cave people thousands of years ago who collected honey from beehives with a stick. Not wanting to waste the sweet nectar, they most likely licked the stick, thus inventing the world’s first lollipop. Good for them (good for us). Archaeologists believe that ancient Chinese, Arabs, and Egyptians all produced fruit and nut confections that they "candied" in honey, which serves as a preservative, and inserted sticks into to make easier to eat.


In the 17th Century, as sugar became more plentiful, the English enjoyed boiled sugar candy treats and inserted sticks into them to make them easier to eat, too. Linguists say the term ‘lolly pop’ literally means ‘tongue slap’ (which we find hilarious) since the word for ‘tongue’ is ‘lolly’ in Northern England and ‘pop’ means ‘slap.’ London street vendors may have coined this term as they peddled the treat, which was soft rather than hard, but still considered a possible forerunner to the modern lollipop. 


If the 17th Century English version doesn’t count as the first modern lollipop, you could look to the Civil War era for another early forerunner, when hard candy was put on the tips of pencils for children. The early 20th Century was the era of automation, which is when the birth of the lollipop as we now know it begins in earnest, but there are still discrepancies as to who is the true creator. 

As early as 1905, the owner of the McAviney Candy Company may have stumbled upon the lollipop by accident. The company made boiled hard candies that were stirred with a stick, and at day's end, the owner brought the sticks covered with the candy home for his kids to enjoy. It wasn't until 1908 that he began to market these "used candy sticks." 

Also in 1908, in Racine, Wisconsin, the first automated lollipop production was brought about by the Racine Confectionary Machine Company that introduced a machine that put hard candy on the end of a stick at the rate of 2,400 sticks per hour. Owners of the company believed that they could produce enough lollipops (although they weren’t called that yet) in a single week to supply the nation's demand for an entire year.

In approximately 1912, Russian immigrant Samuel Born invented a machine that inserted sticks into candy. The machine was called the Born Sucker Machine and the City of San Francisco considered it so innovative that they awarded him the keys to the city in 1916. George Smith, owner of a confectionary company called the Bradley Smith Company, took credit for inventing the modern version of the lollipop which he began making in 1908, and in 1931, he trademarked the term ‘lollipop,” borrowing the name from a famous race horse named Lolly Pop, which is when the term lollipop finally connects back to the 17th Century phrase (‘tongue slap,’ remember?). 


As you can see, the development of the lollipop took its time and there is some competition for the title “creator of the lollipop,” but regardless who gets credit for it, it’s here to stay and it’s currently one of the most popular candies in existence. Modern companies such as the Spangler Candy Company (creator of Dum Dums, Saf-T-Pops, and other favorites) can produce up to 3,000,000 per day, which still hardly satisfies the nation's sweet tooth.

Lollipops today come in all shapes and sizes, and we offer more than 100 varieties. Whether you want a Charms Lollipop, aTootsie Pop, or a lollipop with a cricket inside, our selection is second to none. So go ahead and order yourself and your loved ones a ‘tongue slap,’ and then enlighten them with all of your new knowledge; they’ll be so impressed. Finally, if we may end our History of the Lollipop with a lesson: when you don’t know what else to do, put a stick in it.


Source: goorme.com ; candyfavorites.com