Tootsie Roll is a

chocolate Chocolate is a food made from roasted and ground cacao seed kernels that is available as a liquid, solid, or paste, either on its own or as a flavoring agent in other foods. Cacao has been consumed in some form since at least the Olmec civ ...

-flavored taffy that has been manufactured in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

since 1907. The candy has qualities similar to both

caramels Caramel ( or ) is an orange-brown confectionery product made by heating a range of sugars. It can be used as a flavoring in puddings and desserts, as a filling in bonbons, or as a topping for ice cream and custard. The process of caramelizatio ...

and taffy without being exactly either confection. The

manufacturer Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a ran ...

Tootsie Roll Industries Tootsie Roll Industries is an American manufacturer of confectionery based in Chicago, Illinois. Its best-known products include the namesake Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops. Tootsie Roll Industries currently markets its brands internationally in ...

, is based in

Chicago, Illinois (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. It was the first

penny candy A penny is a coin ( pennies) or a unit of currency (pl. pence) in various countries. Borrowed from the Carolingian denarius (hence its former abbreviation d.), it is usually the smallest denomination within a currency system. Presently, it is t ...

to be individually wrapped in America.

Introduction

According to the official company history, founder Leo Hirschfield (spelled Hirshfield in Tootsie Industries history) was an

Austrian Jewish The history of the Jews in Austria probably begins with the exodus of Jews from Judea under Roman occupation. Over the course of many centuries, the political status of the community rose and fell many times: during certain periods, the Jewis ...

immigrant to the United States of America, son of an Austrian candy maker. He started his own career in the candy business at a small shop or factory located in New York City during 1896. He was employed in a senior position at the Stern & Saalberg company in

Manhattan, New York Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, owned by Julius Stern and Jacob Saalberg, for many years. Details of his early career are disputed. The more common version has him starting a candy shop in Brooklyn that later merged with Stern & Saalberg. Another version has him starting at the factory and rising to a senior development position. The first candy that Hirschfield created was Bromangelon Jelly Powder. He completed the invention of Tootsie Rolls in 1907, after patenting a technique to give them their unique texture. He named the candy after his daughter Clara, whose nickname was "Tootsie". The first Tootsie Rolls were marketed commercially in September 1908. Hirschfeld became vice-president of the company, which changed its name to Sweets Company of America in 1917 around the time of the retirement of founders Stern and Saalberg. Hirschfield resigned or was fired in 1920, and subsequently started Mells Candy. On January 14, 1922, in his room at the Monterey Hotel in Manhattan, he shot himself dead, leaving a note saying that he was "sorry, but could not help it." In 1935, the company was in serious difficulty. Tootsie Roll's principal supplier of paper boxes, Joseph Rubin & Sons of Brooklyn, concerned about the possible loss of an important customer, decided to acquire the troubled company. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but Bernard D. Rubin acquired a list of shareholders and approached them in person in order to purchase their shares. The Rubin family eventually achieved control of Tootsie Roll and agreed that Bernard Rubin would run the company as president. Under his leadership, the company was able to steadily increase sales and restore profits by changing the formula of the Tootsie Roll and increasing its size. Additionally, Rubin moved the company from Manhattan to a much larger plant in Hoboken, New Jersey, and guided the company successfully through the difficult war years during which vital raw materials were in short supply. When he died in 1948, he had increased the sales volume twelve-fold. After Bernard Rubin's death, his brother William B. Rubin served as president until 1962, when William's daughter Ellen Rubin Gordon took control. As of August 2015, she is chairman and CEO of the company, having succeeded her late husband, Melvin Gordon, who was chairman and CEO for many years.

(name adopted in 1966) is one of the largest candy manufacturers in the world. Approximately 64 million Tootsie Rolls are made daily. According to the company website, the original recipe calls for the inclusion of the previous day's batch, a graining process that continues to this day. "As such, there's (theoretically) a bit of Leo's very first Tootsie Roll in every one of the sixty four million Tootsie Rolls that Tootsie produces each day."Welcome to Tootsie – Tootsie Roll Product Information
Tootsie.com (2014-05-04). Retrieved 2014-06-03.

Tootsie Roll Hero

Captain Tootsie is an advertisement

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

created for Tootsie Rolls in 1943 by C C Beck, Peter Costanza and Bill Schreider (1950 onwards). It featured the title character Captain Tootsie and his sidekick, a boy named Rollo (a black-haired boy), and three other young cohorts named Fatso (a red-haired boy), Fisty (a blonde boy), and Sweetie (a blonde-haired girl). It had stories in the form of full color one-page Sunday strips, black and white daily strips, and two issues of a comic book of the same title released by

Toby Press Toby Press was an American comic-book company that published from 1949 to 1955. Founded by Elliott Caplin, brother of cartoonist Al Capp and himself an established comic strip writer, the company published reprints of Capp's ''Li'l Abner'' strip; ...

. The advertisement comic was featured by many publishers and in the newspapers. Within the context of the stories, Captain Tootsie was quite strong and quicker to the punch than any of his enemies. His stories were light and "kid-friendly". Captain Tootsie's comic strip ads ended in the 1950s. In the 1970s, artist

Herb Trimpe Herbert William Trimpe (; May 26, 1939 – April 13, 2015) was an American comics artist and occasional writer, best known as the seminal 1970s artist on ''The Incredible Hulk'' and as the first artist to draw for publication the character Wolver ...

is believed to have modeled the original costume for the

Marvel Comics Marvel Comics is an American comic book publishing, publisher and the flagship property of Marvel Entertainment, a divsion of The Walt Disney Company since September 1, 2009. Evolving from Timely Comics in 1939, ''Magazine Management/Atlas Co ...

character

Doc Samson Doc Samson (Leonard Skivorski Jr.) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character is usually depicted as a superhero and psychiatrist in the Marvel Universe, known as a supporting character in ...

partly on Captain Tootsie's uniform.Brian Cronin (Nov 28, 2019)
How Erik Larsen Has Used a Lost Hero As a Naive, Yet Compelling Contrast
CBR.com, accessed 05 September 2020 In 2019, artist/writer

Erik Larsen Erik J. Larsen (born December 8, 1962) is an American comic book artist, writer, and publisher. He currently acts as the chief financial officer of Image Comics. He gained attention in the early 1990s with his art on Spider-Man series for Marvel ...

used Captain Tootsie as one of several older comic book characters in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

as part of his

Savage Dragon The Savage Dragon is a fictional superhero created by Erik Larsen, published by Image Comics and taking place in the Image Universe. The comic features the adventures of a superheroic police officer named the Dragon. The character first appeared ...

series.

Jingle

The Tootsie Roll

jingle A jingle is a short song or tune used in advertising and for other commercial uses. Jingles are a form of sound branding. A jingle contains one or more hooks and meaning that explicitly promote the product or service being advertised, usually t ...

, "Whatever It Is I Think I See", was recorded at Blank Tape Studios, New York in 1976. Elements of this ad can occasionally be seen today during advertised children's programming. It aired on television regularly for more than 20 years, mostly during Saturday morning cartoon programming. The jingle was sung by a nine-year-old, Rebecca Jane Weinstein, and 13-year-old David Johnson, the children of

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...

musicians and friends of the song's composer. Originally David was to sing the solo "Whatever it is I think I see becomes a Tootsie Roll to me", but his voice was changing and cracked on the high notes, so the solo was given to Rebecca. Rebecca still has the original

reel-to-reel audio tape recording Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the ''supply reel'' (or ''feed reel'') containing the tape is plac ...

Ingredients

The current U.S. ingredients of a Tootsie Roll are:

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

corn syrup Corn syrup is a food syrup which is made from the starch of corn (called maize in many countries) and contains varying amounts of sugars: glucose, maltose and higher oligosaccharides, depending on the grade. Corn syrup is used in foods to softe ...

palm oil Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil derived from the mesocarp (reddish pulp) of the fruit of the oil palms. The oil is used in food manufacturing, in beauty products, and as biofuel. Palm oil accounted for about 33% of global oils produced from ...

, condensed

skim milk Skimmed milk (British English), or skim milk (American English), is made when all the milkfat is removed from whole milk. It tends to contain around 0.1% fat. Background Historically, skimmed milk was used for fattening pigs, and was recommended ...

cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...

whey Whey is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained. It is a byproduct of the manufacturing of cheese or casein and has several commercial uses. Sweet whey is a byproduct resulting from the manufacture of rennet types of hard ...

soy lecithin Lecithin (, from the Greek ''lekithos'' "yolk") is a generic term to designate any group of yellow-brownish fatty substances occurring in animal and plant tissues which are amphiphilic – they attract both water and fatty substances (and so a ...

, and artificial and natural flavors. In 2009, Tootsie Rolls became certified kosher by the

Orthodox Union The Orthodox Union (abbreviated OU) is one of the largest Orthodox Jewish organizations in the United States. Founded in 1898, the OU supports a network of synagogues, youth programs, Jewish and Religious Zionist advocacy programs, programs for ...

.Tootsie Roll Goes Kosher
Ou.org (2009-12-02). Retrieved 2012-01-03.

Alternate flavors

In addition to the traditional cocoa-flavored Tootsie Roll, several additional flavors have been introduced. Known as Tootsie Fruit Chews, flavors include

cherry A cherry is the fruit of many plants of the genus ''Prunus'', and is a fleshy drupe (stone fruit). Commercial cherries are obtained from cultivars of several species, such as the sweet ''Prunus avium'' and the sour ''Prunus cerasus''. The nam ...

orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower *Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum * ...

vanilla Vanilla is a spice derived from orchids of the genus ''Vanilla (genus), Vanilla'', primarily obtained from pods of the Mexican species, flat-leaved vanilla (''Vanilla planifolia, V. planifolia''). Pollination is required to make the p ...

lemon The lemon (''Citrus limon'') is a species of small evergreen trees in the flowering plant family Rutaceae, native to Asia, primarily Northeast India (Assam), Northern Myanmar or China. The tree's ellipsoidal yellow fruit is used for culin ...

, and

lime Lime commonly refers to: * Lime (fruit), a green citrus fruit * Lime (material), inorganic materials containing calcium, usually calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide * Lime (color), a color between yellow and green Lime may also refer to: Botany ...

. These varieties are wrapped in red, orange, blue, yellow, and green wrappers, respectively. They also offer a special Mega Mix bag that includes specialty flavors, green apple, blue raspberry, and

grape A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus ''Vitis''. Grapes are a non- climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters. The cultivation of grapes began perhaps 8,000 years ago, ...

. The specialty Fruit Chews are wrapped in dark green, dark blue, and purple to corollate with their flavors. Tootsie Frooties come in numerous different fruit flavors, including strawberry, blue raspberry, grape, green apple, banana berry, smooth cherry, fruit punch, pink lemonade, root beer, cranberry, blueberry, watermelon, and the newest, mango.

References

External links

*
Tootsie Roll Tragedy: The Real Leo Hirschfeld Story
{{Tootsie Roll confectionery products Brand name confectionery Tootsie Roll Industries brands Products introduced in 1907 Kosher food Candy bars