Craze for Sweets

Sugar demand and consumption exploded in the 1920s and 1930s. The postwar crash in sugar prices allowed candy makers to sell chocolate bars at lower prices, and solid chocolate surpassed drinking chocolate in popularity. But the familiar wrapped candy bars did not appear widely until merchants put them adjacent to cash registers in grocery stores, drugstores, newsstands, and cigar stores. See candy bar.

The arrival of modern refrigeration led to affordable frozen novelties. In 1919 Christian Nelson, an ice cream parlor owner, found a way to dip blocks of frozen ice cream in chocolate. He called them “Temptation I-Scream Bars.” They were so popular that, with entrepreneur Russell Stover, he began to mass-produce them, wrapping each one in aluminum foil and changing the name to Eskimo Pie. However, Good Humor is credited as the first company to put ice cream on a stick, with the slogan “The New Clean Convenient Way to Eat Ice Cream.” See eskimo pie and good humor man.