Charms Candy Company
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| Product type | Confectionery |
|---|---|
| Owner | Tootsie Roll Industries |
| Introduced | 1969 |
| Previous owners | Charms |
Charms Blow Pops are lollipops with bubble gum centers surrounded by a hard candy shell. The candy was popularized by The Charms Candy Company. Invention of the candy is attributed to Ross Cameron, Walter Reid, and Vince Ciccone[citation needed]. Blow Pops became the Charms Candy Company's best-selling product of all time.
In 1988, the Charms Candy Company was sold to Tootsie Roll Industries. With the addition of Blow Pops to their product line which included Tootsie Rolls, the Tootsie Roll Company became the largest lollipop manufacturer in the world.
Walter W. Reid Jr. founded the Charms Candy Company in 1912. The company was originally called Tropical Charms, a reference to the individually wrapped square-shaped hard candies, which were one of the first to be individually wrapped in cellophane.
Tropical Charms was founded in Topeka, New Jersey. The company name was eventually shortened to Charms.
During World War II, the U.S. Army began including Charms candies in combat rations as a supplemental energy form. That tradition has continued with a few interruptions.
After the war, Walter Reid III, the son of the founder, took control of the company and made it the leading producer of hard candy in the world. Little known fact that Charms developed a wide variety of confections. 1937 - 1950s Charms started producing pecan filled chocolate bars called "25 Carats" made with The Hershey Company top grade chocolate (at that time, Hershey had 3 grades of chocolate). The chocolate candy was discontinued due to the high margin cost and other internal problems. In the 1960s beside making other Holiday candy lollipops they also produced Charms "Jellies" and Chuckles Gum Drops. Later they created a peanut butter filled hard candy in the shape of a peanut leading up to the idea of the Blow Pop. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the company developed the Charms Blow Pop, the first bubble gum-filled lollipop in the world. Blow pops come in watermelon, strawberry, cherry, grape and sour apple flavors.(Apple came later and was originally round like an apple)
The company was led by Reid III, Ross B. Cameron Sr. (Walter W. Reid Jr.’s son-in-law) and his two sons, Ross B. Cameron Jr. and Reid B. Cameron.
The Charms Candy Company moved its manufacturing plant from Bloomfield, NJ to Freehold, NJ in 1973. The company eventually purchased and built a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Covington, Tennessee, which is currently still being used to produce Charms candies.
Besides the Blow Pop, the candy company produced Charms Squares, Sweet & Sour Pops, Sour Balls and many other smaller candy products.
