The Haribo candy company is founded - December 13th, 1920

On this day in 1920, Hans Riegel founded the Haribo candy company in Bonn, Germany.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those who can never know enough about history.
I'm Gabe Bluesier, and today we're talking about the origin

(00:21):
of gummy bears, including how they went from a niche
German product to a global favorite, and why their iconic
shape wasn't always as cute and cuddly as it is today. Boo.
The day was December thirteenth, nineteen twenty. Hans Reegel founded

(00:44):
the Harribo Candy Company in Bonn, Germany. It started as
a one man operation in a small backyard kitchen. Armed
with nothing but a bag of sugar, a marble slab,
a brick oven, a copper kettle, and a rolling pin,
Regal set to work making hard candies to sell around town.
But the company and its product line grew over time,

(01:07):
and today Harribo is the world's leading manufacturer of gummy candy,
including its flagship product, the original gummy Bear. Although Regal
was the first to make gummy products shaped like bears,
gelatin based candies pre date his invention by at least
a decade or so. Gelatin is made from a protein

(01:29):
called collagen, which is derived from animal products, most commonly
pork and cattle bones. In nineteen oh nine, a British
candy maker named Charles Gordon Maynard introduced one of the
first commercial treats made with gelatin. He called them wine gums,
though they didn't contain any alcohol and they came in

(01:49):
generic geometric shapes like circles and squares. Wine gums were
and still are a popular candy, but there was room
for improvement when it came to the presentation, and at
the end of the day, a bear is just more
fun than a rhombus. Hans Regal was no stranger to
sweets when he started Haribo in nineteen twenty He had

(02:11):
just left his job at a local candy factory and
decided to put his knowledge of confectionery to work at
his own company. He called the new venture Harribo, a
portmanteau or mashup of Hans Regal and Bond. The first
products he made in his home kitchen were colorless hard candies,
which he sold at local street fairs. In nineteen twenty one,

(02:34):
the company hired its first employee, Hans' wife, Gertrude, who
began delivering the sweets to customers on her bicycle. The
Regals candy sold well, but there was nothing to set
it apart from the competition. That's when Hans hit on
the idea of branching into gummy candy, but instead of
sticking to basic shapes, he would mold his fruit flavored

(02:56):
gelatine into the shape of bears. He called the product
the dancing Bear or tons bearn in German. Introduced in
nineteen twenty two, the dancing bear was bigger and thinner
than modern gummy bears and had a more naturalistic look
compared to the pudgier teddy bear shapes were used to today.

(03:17):
Kids love animals, so modeling your candy off the shape
of one seems like a no brainer. But if you're
wondering why Regal chose bears in particular, well, that leads
to the sour side of the sweet's history. Beginning in
the Middle Ages, trained dancing bears were featured as entertainment
at festivals all over Europe. Children and adults alike were

(03:40):
delighted to see these ferocious, lumbering beasts dancing in sync
with live music, but what they didn't see was the
tortuous process by which the bears were trained. Their owners
taught captive bears to dance by forcing them to stand
on heated metal plates while music was played. As the
plates got hotter, the bears would hop from one paw

(04:02):
to the other to relieve their suffering. Eventually, the bears
began to associate music with discomfort, and they would instinctively
lift their feet whenever they heard it, making it appear
as if they were dancing. Although the practice is banned
in Germany today, in the early twentieth century, real dancing
bears were still a fixture of German festivals, and Hans

(04:24):
Regal knew his customers would recognize the likeness just like
their grim real world counterparts. Harrobou's dancing bears were a
huge hit with the public. Their strong sales prompted Regal
to buy a company car to keep up with the
increasing demand. Then, in nineteen twenty five, Harrobaux expanded its
offerings again by introducing black licorice to its lineup. Products

(04:49):
included black licorice sticks, wheels, and of course, a black
bear or schwarz bar. By nineteen thirty, Harrabo had moved
from a home kitchen to its own own factory, and
its workforce had grown from just two employees to one
hundred and sixty. The company continued to grow throughout the decade,
introducing new flavors and shapes to its product line, along

(05:12):
with a simple but accurate slogan, Harribo Mocked kinderfro or
Haribo makes children Happy. By the start of World War
iiO Harribo employed more than four hundred people and was
cranking out ten tons of candy each day. But as
you might imagine, the war wasn't great for business, and

(05:32):
all the gains the company had seen in the nineteen
thirties slipped away in an instant. The regal family suffered
setbacks as well. Hans's sons, Paul and Hans Junior, fought
for the Nazis and were both captured and held as
prisoners of war by American forces. Then, in nineteen forty five,
Hans himself died at the age of fifty two, leaving

(05:55):
Gertrude to run the company herself. The couple's sons were
the following year, at which point they relieved their mother
and assumed leadership of Harribo, with Paul in charge of
production and Hans Junior handling, marketing, and sales. Harribou rebounded
with them at the Helm, going from just thirty employees

(06:15):
after the war to more than one thousand by nineteen fifty.
The brothers spent the next decade shoring up the business
at home as Germany licked its wounds. Then in nineteen
sixty they took the brand international for the first time,
selling Harribou products to the wider European market. They also
rebranded their signature dancing bears as gold Bears or gold barn.

(06:41):
The look of the bears changed along with the name,
as they assumed the now classic shape of a tubby
teddy bear sitting on its hind legs. The makeover worked
like a charm, and pretty soon Harribou was gobbling up
competing candymakers and building new factories all across Europe. In
nineteen sixty seven, Harrobou changed things up again by manufacturing

(07:03):
multi colored gummy bears, rather than only making them in gold.
The flavor assigned to each color varies somewhat by region,
but in the US the red bears are raspberry, the
yellow bears are lemon, the orange ones are orange, the
translucent bears are pineapple, and the green ones are strawberry.

(07:23):
Of course, Harribo gummy bears weren't available in American markets
until the early nineteen eighties, and by that point other
companies such as Brox and Trolley had already introduced their
own bear shaped gummies in the States. The competition led
Harobo to think outside the box and beyond the bear,
leading to a slew of new shapes and flavors, everything

(07:46):
from happy cherries and dinosaurs to Fizzicola and sour Skeddy.
All that innovation paid off, and today, more than a
century after its founding, Harribo is more popular than ever.
Their gummies are sold in more than one hundred countries worldwide,
and one hundred million of their bears are produced every day.

(08:11):
I'm Gabeluesier and hopefully you now know a little more
about history today than you did yesterday. You can learn
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way by writing to this day at iHeartMedia dot com.

(08:35):
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank
you for listening. I'll see you back here again. Tomorrow
for another day in history class,