The BUN – When A Candy Bar Isn’t A Bar

When you were a kid, was there a large-scale candy product that was made right there in your home town? In my own case, there certainly was – it was (then) called simply the Bun and was made in Fort Wayne, Indiana by Wayne Candies. Wayne Candies has been out of business for a long time now, but its No. 1 famous product is still being made – the Bun. Which some argue should be spelled BUN.

The company that brought us the Bun dates all the way back to 1902, when Anthony Heit, Joseph Miller and Thomas Lau formed a confectionary company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which they imaginatively named the Heit-Miller-Lau Company. Because the city was named for Revolutionary War General Anthony Wayne (sometimes called “Mad Anthony” for his unorthodox military ways), it was only natural that Mrs. Wayne would be remembered as well, with some of the company’s early products being named for her – chocolates under both the Mary Wayne and the Lady Wayne brands.

W. Charles Dickmeyer bought the company in 1930 and changed the name to Wayne Candies, while continuing its popular confections. The origins of the Bun are a little murky – some sources say the product was introduced in the 1920’s, but the better information seems to be 1941 when Wayne copyrighted the name “Vanilla Cream Bun”. Or maybe 1939 when they applied for “Bun” as a trademark. Let’s just go with “a long time ago” and agree that the Bun was definitely a thing long before the 1950’s.

So, what is a Bun? It has been described on labels as a peanut cluster. Which is another way of saying that there is a blob of flavored filling which is then covered with peanuts and then the whole thing is coated in chocolate. If you are familiar with another famous product called Turtles, think of the Bun as a super-sized Turtle, but with a choice of different flavored centers. In addition to the Bun’s original vanilla cream, the product still comes in maple cream and caramel varieties too. The caramel variety has apparently been changed to sea-salt caramel in its most modern iteration.

OK, let’s get one thing out of the way. If you call it a “Bun bar” you are, well, misguided. I was going to use a stronger term but was throttled back by my better nature. I knew kids who called it a “Bun bar”. If you look up the product on a certain website that calls itself an online encyclopedia, that site’s entry is for a “Bun Bar”. But it’s not a bar. We all know what a bar looks like. Whether we think of a gold bar or a salad bar, a bar is a rectangular something or other that has a length far longer than its width. Does a Bun look like a bar to you? Of course not! Which is why we will stick to “peanut cluster” as its descriptor. In fairness, there are a few old promotional items that use the term “bar”, but we all know about the people who do advertising, right? If we were wrong to trust them when they hired doctors to promote certain brands of cigarettes as safer, why would we listen to them when they tried to describe a peanut cluster shaped like a big, soft cookie as a bar?

We should know by now that some candy manufacturers outlive an old product and some old products outlive their candy manufacturers. The Bun (or BUN) is in the second category. Mr. Dickmeyer died in 1968 and his family sold the company to Leaf Brands of Chicago (Whoppers malted milk balls and baseball trading cards). Leaf sold Wayne to Curtiss (Baby Ruth, Butterfinger) in 1974.

It was under Curtiss that Wayne’s Reggie bar was introduced – essentially a caramel Bun re-named and re-packaged to promote the baseball fame of Reggie Jackson in the late 1970’s. Curtiss (part of Standard Brands) merged with Nabisco in 1981 (about the time the Reggie bar went away), and sold Wayne to Storck (Werther’s Original). Storck then, in turn, pushed the poor company off on Pittsburgh Food & Beverage (Clark Bar and Slo Poke) in 1992.

It was Pittsburgh who pulled the plug on the venerable Fort Wayne candy-making operation in 1995. But we Fort Wayne natives can gloat just a little with the knowledge that Pittsburg got its comeuppance when it filed for bankruptcy in 1998. Is it being mean to say it serves them right? But the Bun was not done (yes, I meant to do that) and it was purchased out of the former owner’s bankruptcy by the Pearson Candy Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, which continues to make the product.

So, which version of the Bun is the best one? Actually, I like them all. But my favorite is the Maple, probably because it is the least like any other candy product of the three varieties. The Caramel Bun reminds me of a big Turtle, and the Vanilla Cream is a little too, well, vanilla. Though it will thoroughly and pleasurably resolve an attack by one’s sweet tooth.

I am not going to argue that the Bun is one of the best candies you can buy today – no, there are far too many artisan chocolatiers who will dazzle your taste buds (while they majorly lighten your wallet). But when you get a taste for an old-school commercially-made candy, well, bar, you can do a lot worse than to skip the bars and go for a Bun. Because it’s fun to eat a Bun!

22 thoughts on “The BUN – When A Candy Bar Isn’t A Bar”

  1. For having grown up in the state next door, I have never heard of a Bun. Perhaps the Bun was the counterpoint to Coors and not sold west of the Mississippi River where we got our groceries.

    These certainly do sound good, especially the (sea salt) caramel. I’m going to be on the lookout for one as these have me really wanting to try one.

    The only similarity I can think of is when we lived in St. Joseph, MO, home of the Cherry Mash. The Cherry Mash website states the wrapper has remained unchanged since the 1930s. The Cherry Mash, like the Bun, is not a bar. Rather, it has a cherry center wrapped in chocolate and peanuts, so there are some basic similarities going on.

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  2. The Bun is familiar to me, but not always available all the places where I’ve lived. I remember having a few as a kid, probably in Chicago, but they disappeared as we moved farther away. Amazingly, it’s one of those things that are scarce, so even tho not much of a candy eater, when I see them, I buy one, and yes, Maple. When I lived in Indianapolis, I had a Maple about once a month. As an aside, I mentioned one time that I was craving a Chunky, and no one on my staff in Indianapolis had ever heard of one? Had to buy bunch at a gas station for them, next time I drove to the northern mid-west.

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    • I remember the Chunky being advertised on TV when I was a kid, though probably not for all that long. I tried one, but was not a fan of the raisins. But then I eventually became a big fan of Raisinets, so maybe I ought to try one again. I saw some awhile back, but cannot remember where – maybe a Cracker Barrel?

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  3. Wow, I don’t know the brand of the candy I ate a few times but I suddenly remember having some version of the “bun” pictured. It must not have been very available to me because it makes my mouth water just looking at it!

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  7. I have never heard of a Bun but I like this delicious description of it. I am familiar with Turtles as my grandmother and mother adored them, so I’ve tasted them, before getting braces on my teeth, so many years ago. I was the oldest “kid” at the orthodontist’s office and he’d always wag a finger at me “remember, no Kraft Carmels or any kind of caramel candy!” I assured him I would not eat caramel, however, one long holiday weekend my top and bottom back braces hooked together somehow. My father said “I’ll cut the wire with pinsnips!” I said “no way!” I used all the dental wax I had on hand to avoid scraping the inside of my cheek. At my emergency appointment after the long holiday I was scolded for being an adult who couldn’t resist caramel.
    Really?!

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      • Yes, it was awful JP and wouldn’t you know, it was the Saturday morning of a three-day weekend. My orthodontist would do the monthly tightening of the wires using some type of tool and he did not have a light touch, while meanwhile two assistants, one on either side of me were tapping away with their respective mouth-sized mallets. The chair patients sat/laid in while our braces were being attended to were about a foot shorter than my 5′ 9″ frame so my lower legs hung in mid-air!

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  8. The maple Bun was my mom’s favorite candy. Growing up in the 70s, every grocery in South Bend had Buns in the checkout aisle candy display. But it was almost always just the vanilla Buns. Whenever I’d see maple Buns, I’d always buy one for Mom. Somewhere along the way actual maple flavor was replaced with artificial. While Mom was not unhappy to eat one, she said it knocked them out of the favorite spot for her.

    I have never seen a caramel Bun and did not know they existed.

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    • I suspect that the original formula went away around the time they shuttered the Fort Wayne plant, but saw no reference to the change anywhere online.

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  9. I’ve never heard of this candy, but it sounds good – particularly the vanilla creme variety.

    In central Pennsylvania, we have Mallo Cups, which are still manufactured in Altoona by the Boyer Candy Company. (One could include Hershey in the list of local companies, but its products are definitely distributed throughout the nation!)

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    • I have seen Mallo Cups. Marshmallow in candy usually moves it down a tier or two in my book, but I will confess that I have never tried one, something that must be remedied!

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  10. The old-school promotion tactics are wonderful. “Buy them by the box.” “Put one in Dad’s lunchbox.” Did Dad really have a lunchbox in the old days? More importantly, what is the consistency of a Bun? I’m not familiar with them and I’m thrown off by the “creme” wording, as if they’re soft and truffle-like. When you say “turtle” I’m picturing something that’ll rip out your dental work. Also, the consolidation of the candy companies over the years is an interesting history. I need to look up “Heidi” to figure out where some of their licorice products ended up (or died). Their classic “Heidi” (black licorice button) remains my all-time favorite sweet.

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    • I would describe the consistency of centers of the maple and vanilla versions as being like that of a nougat, only maybe a little thicker. Not really creamy, but a lot like the centers of candies from a box of assorted chocolates. As for the old ad, when that ran in the mid 1950’s, Fort Wayne was a booming factory town. We built International Harvester trucks, Fruehauf trailers, engine parts (Zollner Piston), electric motors (GE) gas pumps (Tokheim) and a whole bunch of other stuff, so there were a lot of factory-working dads who surely did have lunchboxes.

      Anything made with black licorice will probably not be featured here any time soon. That is one candy I could never get behind.

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