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The concept and history of lollipops can be traced back to ancient times.
Egyptians, Chinese, and Arabs mixed fruits and nuts in honey, putting them on sticks to avoid sticky hands.
17th-century: The proto-version of lollipops were started by street vendors of London.
These vendors sold soft candies on a stick as sugar became available in Europe.
There was no mass-market version yet; most of these early iterations were created by hand in the home.
1908: George Smith of New Haven, Connecticut, created the first modern lollipop.
His venture started by bringing candy-coated sticks home for his children, and it evolved into a semi-large business venture.
He named his invention “Lolly Pop” after his favorite racing horse and trademarked “lollipop” in 1931.
1912: Samuel Born invented the Born Sucker Machine that automatically inserted sticks into candy.
The machine could spit out 60 lollipops per minute and was so impressive that San Francisco awarded him the key to the city in 1916.
Born would eventually go beyond lollipops to create candies like Mike and Ike, Hot Tamales, and Peeps.
1924: Dum Dums lollipops were created when a company executive chose the name because it would be easy for children to say and remember.
The brand became successful in 1953 when Spangler Candy purchased Dum Dums and began mass producing the candy in its seven original flavors including lemon, lime, orange, coconut-pineapple, cherry, grape, and butterscotch.
1931: Tootsie Roll Industries invented by combining a hard candy shell with their signature chewy chocolate-flavored center on a stick.
The invention made the company the world’s largest manufacturer of lollipops, producing 16 million lollipops at its peak.
1958: Chupa Chups was founded by Spanish confectioner Enric Bernat.
The brand’s name comes from the Spanish verb “chupar” meaning “to suck,” and was in production in 1961.
The lollipop is best known for its daisy-shaped logo, designed by Salvador Dalí in 1969.
1960s: Blow Pops were first patented by Thomas Tidwell (who called it the Triple Treat).
However, it took more than a decade to debut in 1973.
It was the first lollipop ever made with a soft bubblegum center, and became Charms’ most successful product of all time.
It would help the company become the world’s largest producer of hard candy in the 1970s.
1970s: Ring Pops were invented by Frank Richards, who was a product engineer at the Topps Company.
Richards created the candy to help his daughter stop sucking her thumb.
They launched Ring Pops with two flavors—Strawberry and Grape.
It peaked in popularity in the 1980s thanks to its catchy commercial tagline: “It’s a lollipop, without a stick! A ring of flavor that you can lick!”.
1986: Push Pops were first introduced by Topps Company, launching with Cherry and Grape flavors in a tube design that allowed consumers to save their candy for later.
The lollipop design became popular in the 1990s, with iterations including the Jumbo Push Pop and Triple Power Push Pop (known for three flavors in one container).
Modern times: The world record for the largest lollipop has been broken multiple times.
Ashrita Furman created a 6,706-pound red candy lollipop in 2009 to honor Sri Chinmoy’s birthday.
However, the current record holder is See’s Candies, with their massive chocolate-flavored lollipop weighing 7,003 pounds (equivalent to 145,000 regular-sized lollipops) in 2012 for National Lollipop Day in San Francisco.
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