With the congestion of competition in the east coast candy market, it was exceedingly difficult for any one business to keep its head above water.Īnd so, hearing the clarion call from the West, adventurous brother Gustav called upon Ferdinand and Albert to move their enterprise to Chicago in 1876. The Brothers Bunte were the confectioners du jour in the City of Brotherly Love, but success was ultimately fleeting. According to legend, young Ferdinand Bunte’s first go at confectioning-using one little kettle in the back room of his store-produced sweets so mouth-watering that people started coming from all over town just to get a whiff of them. Marine Corps at the tail end of the Civil War. 1846), Gustavus (1852), and Albert (1855) German immigrants who arrived in Philadelphia as teenagers and entered into the candy business there in the late 1860s-after Ferdinand had completed a stint with the U.S. Across 80 years, Bunte Brothers truly mastered the art of making cheap candy seem classy, and in the process, they enabled several generations of sweet-toothed Americans to enjoy their vices with reverence, rather than shame. The four colorful Bunte tins in our museum collection, which date from around the 1910’s to the ’30s, have a regal, classical flare to match the company’s sophisticated reputation. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the city was home to many of the leading candy makers in the country, and Bunte Brothers, for a time, was arguably chief among them all-producing more than 1,000 different varieties of goodies, including the first peanut-chocolate candy bar (Tangos), the first hard candies with soft fruit filling (Diana “Stuft” Confections), and possibly the first mass-produced, wholesale Christmas candy canes. It was definitely candy-sweet, delectable, teeth-rotting candy.įor the thousands of Chicago factory workers employed in the confectionery trade, there was often no better reward for a hard day’s work than a handful of the merchandise. Which industry best exemplified the spirit of Chicago at its manufacturing zenith? The steel mills? The Union Stock Yards? The railroads? Architecture?

Museum Artifacts: Bunte “Fine Confections, “Diana,” “Stuft” and “World Famous Candies” Tins by Bunte Brothers, 1910s-1930s

Pratts billiards chicago