Baby Ruth Candy Bar

In 1916, Otto Y. Schnering founded a bakery in Chicago. Along with the bakery, he launched a small candy department, which was so successful that the bakery was soon discontinued. Schnering changed the name of the company to reflect his new emphasis, using his mother's maiden name to create the Curtiss Candy Company. One successful product was the Kandy Kate, a bar that had a pastry center topped with nuts and coated with chocolate. In 1920, Curtiss changed the formula of the candy bar to peanuts covered with nougat and chocolate, and changed the name of the confection to Baby Ruth.

Within two years of its creation, the Baby Ruth was sold nationwide. Its popularity convinced Babe Ruth, the baseball player, to form his own company, called the George H. Ruth Candy Co. When the Curtiss Candy Company heard that he planned to launch the Babe Ruth Home Run Bar, it sued Babe Ruth for breach of copyright. In the legal proceedings, lawyers for Curtiss maintained that their Baby Ruth candy bar was named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth. Many observers then and now consider this oft -repeated story a myth, and with good reason. Ruth Cleveland was born on October 3, 1891 and died of diphtheria 13 years later. Cleveland himself died in 1908. When the Baby Ruth bar was introduced, 16 years after Ruth Cleveland's death, few youthful candy buyers would have remembered her but virtually everyone would have known Babe Ruth, who was then the nation's most popular baseball player.

Nevertheless, the Curtiss Candy Company won the suit. When Babe Ruth was informed, he reportedly retorted, "Well, I ain't eatin' your damned candy bar anymore." Whatever the reasons for the name, Baby Ruth was extremely successful, mainly due to Schnering's promotional ability. He chartered an airplane and dropped the bars by parachutes over the city of Pittsburgh. He later expanded his drops to cities in more than 40 states. At the same time, the company began a promotional campaign that placed four-color advertisements in national magazines. These proclaimed that Baby Ruth was the "sweetest story ever told" and that it was "the world's most popular candy."

These promotional efforts proved successful and Schnering had to build another factory, then another, to keep up with demand for Baby Ruths. These plants consumed five or six train carloads (about 150,000 pounds) of peanuts every day. By 1927, the Curtiss candy-making facilities were the largest of their kind in the world. The plant operated 24 hours a day, and Curtiss operated a fleet of 54 five-ton trucks, which brought in raw materials and distributed finished candy bars. By the late 1920s, Baby Ruth had become the best-selling five-cent confection in America. This position was solidifi ed in 1929, when Curtiss began sponsoring the CBS radio program T e Baby Ruth Hour .

The Curtiss Candy Company was sold to Standard Brands in 1930, which promptly decreased advertising for Baby Ruth candy bars. Mars, Inc., began manufacturing Snickers in 1930, and sales of Baby Ruths were eclipsed by this new confection. The Baby Ruth brand was acquired by Nabisco in 1981 and by the Nestlé SA Food Corporation in 1990. The Baby Ruth candy bar remains among America's mostconsumed confections.