The first medicated throat discs date back to Egypt in 1000 BC. They were made from honey and flavored with eucalyptus. The first ones we’d recognize were called Throaties, invented in 1930. Today’s medicated throat discs are commonly used to temporarily treat sore throats, coughs, and colds. Also called lozenges, they’re made to dissolve slowly in our mouths to soothe our sore throats. Most have some sort of flavoring, usually menthol, honey, cherry, or lemon.
A Closer Look at America’s Oldest Candy: Necco Wafers
In 1847, Englishman Oliver Chase moved to Boston
He worked as a pharmacist and confectioner, a person who made sweetened compounds. One of his goals was to make medicines taste better. So he added peppermint, brown sugar, and gum Arabic (a thickening agent) to the medical ingredients and compressed the mixture into small, hard, flat discs called lozenges.
Chase fiddled with recipes before settling on the formula for sweetened cinnamon and clove candies
Before you could say Jack Robinson, the candy versions were outselling the flavored medicines. Chase’s small hand-made wafers went viral and he couldn’t keep up with the demand. Seeing the opportunity to go big, he invented and patented a machine to mass-produce his candy wafers.
Chase called it a lozenge cutter
Edible Boston says it was powered by a hand crank and was the young country’s first candy machine. Smithsonian says Chase is The Pharmacist Who Launched America’s Modern Candy Industry. And with good reason. He took what had been for ages an artisan’s product and turned it into factory-made goods.
in 1901, after a series of mergers and takeovers, Chase’s company became the New England Confectionery Company. He started calling his lozenges Necco Wafers (get it?) and Bob’s your uncle.
Necco Wafers were the first candies ever to be sold in multi-piece rolls
The thin wafers were a bit larger than an American 25-cent piece and came packaged in paper tubes like the ones from the bank. The difference is that Necco’s tubes were translucent so customers could see the colorful candies inside. The Library of Congress described the packaging as glossy see-through paper that resembled stiff wax paper.
The original Necco Wafers came in eight flavors
Lemon, lime, orange, wintergreen, chocolate, licorice, and the two originals that got the whole thing started, cinnamon and clove.
Chase’s wafers went to war
Beginning with the Civil War, the U.S. Army liked Chase’s wafers enough to issue them as rations. They were easy to carry, easy to eat, and didn’t melt or go stale. They were also a comfort food that contributed to morale, reminders of home for soldiers overseas in World War One and World War Two.
Necco’s biggest single order came from American explorer Admiral Richard Byrd
For an Antarctic expedition he led in 1928, Byrd requisitioned enough Necco Wafers for each man to be issued a pound a week of these candies for two full years.
Necco tradition
History Cambridge says Necco Wafers’ sugar, gelatin, and flavoring are the same ingredients as they were in 1847. They add that much of the machinery used to mix, roll, and press the wafers is 80-year old technology. In keeping with its artisanal beginnings, workers still judge by eye and hand the right number of wafers for the perfect roll, usually 35 pieces.
Necco Wafers aren’t only candy
Company histories tells us that Necco didn’t throw out their spilled, dropped, and broken wafers. They sold them to hog farmers as feed. Necco wafers have also been used as poker chips, checkers, rifle range targets, and toll-booth tokens. Martha Stewart used Necco Wafers as overlapping shingles on gingerbread houses.
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David Allan Van Nostrand wrote this story and more than 500 others posted on this site, so you’re bound to find some things you like and some things you don’t. Some are on the serious side, some show a glimmer of wit, and a few are eye-opening, but all are presentations of facts I was able to find during a couple of days poking around.
I’ve written about thousands of things. What can I write about for you?
Bonus
What do Coca-Cola and Necco Wafers have in common?
In 1985, the highly-paid geniuses running Coca-Cola convinced themselves that Coke needed to taste like Pepsi because blind taste tests demonstrated Coke consumers preferred Pepsi’s taste. The change was a disaster and the original formula was reinstated.
In 2009, the highly-paid geniuses running Necco changed the formula for its Necco Wafers
They removed the candy’s artificial ingredients and dyes and replaced them with natural ones. While they were at it, they softened the hard candy by adding glycerine, a viscous sugar alcohol. The result was that sales tanked until the company returned to the original Necco Wafer formula. Word had it back then that Necco’s cheap and fast research did not mention the Coke debacle.
