The candy cane had a legend, a date and a priest with a patent problem

By Rafe Calder

The origin story most people have heard is a story about a choirmaster. It has no document behind it. The better-documented part of the candy cane is a machine, a Georgia town and a priest who was still waiting on a patent when he retired.

The legend, labeled as one

The Catholic News Service, in a 2017 article on the candy cane’s history, calls that history “a little murky.” It repeats a quotation from a 2015 National Geographic blog: one “unsubstantiated story” says a seventeenth-century choirmaster at Cologne Cathedral had a candy maker bend sugar sticks into shepherd’s crooks to amuse restless children. The candy industry’s trade body, the National Confectioners Association, tells the same tale on its consumer site as “legend has it.” We have found no document for it, and neither source offers one.

CNS adds a plainer explanation that also lacks a source: some say the hook was added to make the candy easier to hang on a Christmas tree.

What is recorded

The same article says handmade white candy canes were first recorded in the United States in 1847. The trade body gives a specific case: a German-Swedish immigrant, August Imgard, decorated a small blue spruce in Wooster, Ohio that year with paper ornaments and candy canes. Both sources say the red stripes arrived later. The trade body puts them around 1900, adding that the candy had been white for some 200 years before. Our reading: until stripes and peppermint arrived, a candy cane was mostly a shape.

A candy company in Albany

The New Georgia Encyclopedia says Bob McCormack, an investor from Birmingham, Alabama, visited Albany, Georgia in 1919 and decided it would suit a candy business. The company took the name Bobs’ Candy Company in 1924. Georgia Public Broadcasting adds that McCormack was the first manufacturer to wrap his candy in cellophane, while the Visit Albany tourism site dates that wrapping to the 1940s and also credits break-proof packaging for candy canes. The encyclopedia lists moisture-proof wrappers among the company’s 1950s innovations instead. These are three overlapping accounts, and we do not try to settle which came first.

The machine

According to the trade body, “pulling, twisting, cutting, and bending the candy canes by hand was a laborious process.” McCormack’s brother-in-law, Father Gregory Keller, a Catholic priest, built a machine for it.

The accounts differ on dates. The Catholic News Service article says Keller invented one machine to twist the soft candy and cut it in 1952, and another to put the crook in the cane in 1957. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says the Keller Machine, in the 1950s, twisted and cut scrap bits of stick candy into pieces that could be sold, and was “perfected” by 1958 to mass-produce the hooked cane. Georgia Public Broadcasting says only “the 1950s.” Three framings, one decade.

The founder’s daughter is quoted in both the CNS article and the Visit Albany site as saying that there was no candy-cane industry until the Keller Machine, because canes had been made by little shops and sold in jars. We cannot test that claim from the sources. It is the line most often repeated.

A patent that had not arrived

CNS reads a 1960 article from the Arkansas diocesan newspaper, which reported that Keller, retiring at 65, still hoped for a patent on the machine the McCormack company was using. The same article says he held patents on other machines, for decorating candy, packaging salted peanuts and processing peanut-butter crackers, and that he donated his royalties to charity.

How a cane is made now

The trade body describes the modern line in steps. Sugar and corn syrup are heated in large kettles and vacuum-cooked, then poured onto a cooling table where peppermint and starch are added; the starch holds the flavor and prevents stickiness. A kneader mixes the flavor in until the candy turns golden brown. A puller turns it silky white. The stripes are made on a heating table and laid on a white log, which is rolled into a cone, sized down to a rope and run through a twister that gives the barber-pole pattern. A cutter snips it into lengths, kept warm so it does not harden. The canes are wrapped and the heat of the candy shrinks the wrappers. A “crooker” then gives the hook, and the canes are placed in boxes called cradles, inspected and shipped.

Notice the order: the hook comes last, after wrapping. Our reading: the bent end is the delicate part, which fits the trade body’s remark that packaging had to be developed to carry “the delicate canes” across the country.

After Albany

The New Georgia Encyclopedia says the McCormack family sold the company in spring 2005 to Farley’s and Sathers Candy Company, which shut down all Albany operations by the end of 2005. Georgia Public Broadcasting adds that Bobs candy canes are “still available today.” The sources do not say who makes them now, and we do not guess.

Dates in order

1847: first recorded handmade white canes in the US, according to CNS.
1919: McCormack founds the Albany company, according to the encyclopedia.
1924: renamed Bobs’ Candy Company, according to the encyclopedia.
1952 and 1957: Keller’s two machines, according to CNS.
1958: Keller Machine “perfected,” according to the encyclopedia.
2005: company sold, Albany operations closed, according to the encyclopedia.

Side by side

1952 and 1957 (CNS) against “perfected by 1958” (encyclopedia) for the Keller Machine.
Cellophane first (GPB) against 1940s cellophane (Visit Albany) against moisture-proof wrappers in the 1950s (encyclopedia).

What kind of sources these are

A state encyclopedia, a public broadcaster’s education page, a tourism board’s blog, a Catholic news service article and a candy trade body’s consumer site. The trade body is an industry voice. We saw its page as a search excerpt, not a full read. We read no patent and no company archive.

What we left out

Sales figures, the company’s later brands and owners, symbolic readings of the stripes and hook, and brand comparisons. We also left out an unrelated anecdote about the priest’s parish career in the CNS article and any account of how many canes a factory ships.

Quick answers

Who invented the candy cane machine? According to Georgia Public Broadcasting and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Father Gregory Keller, brother-in-law of Bobs Candies founder Bob McCormack, built it in the 1950s.

When did candy canes get red stripes? The National Confectioners Association says the red stripes did not appear until around 1900, after about 200 years of white canes.

Is the choirmaster story true? The Catholic News Service calls it an “unsubstantiated story,” and the trade body presents it as legend, so no source we read confirms it.

Roam first. Shop later.

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