Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Sweet Celebration: Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews Turn 100

My mother wasn’t a candy person. (She was a salad person — though in restaurants she told everyone at the table what to order so she could taste the things she’d have preferred to eat if she wasn’t on a perpetual diet.) I can’t remember or even imagine my mother indulging in a Snickers or a Milky Way bar.

The exception to her candy prohibition was Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, which celebrate their 100th anniversary this year. She loved them. I wish I could ask her why, but I can guess: They are diminutive — about a quarter the size of a regular candy bar — so she would have liked that they had a fraction of the calories. And with their filling of molasses-swathed roasted peanuts and the dark chocolate coating, they pack a more assertive flavor and a more satisfyingly chewy texture than more widely available, popular candy bars. (The candy is mainly distributed in Philadelphia and nearby states, though the area is now being increased.)

Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews were introduced by the Goldenberg Candy Company in 1917, as a ration for soldiers in World War I. (The bars were a larger size until 1930.) Founded in 1890 by David Goldenberg, a Romanian immigrant, the Philadelphia-based company was family run until 2003, when it was sold to Just Born, which also makes Peeps, Hot Tamales and Mike and Ikes.

Mom would have hated those products — gummy, colorful sweets were certainly never her thing — but she’d surely have appreciated that her favorite chocolate bar is celebrating an auspicious anniversary. I’m going to track some down and enjoy them in honor of the occasion, and of course in her honor as well.

Liza Schoenfein is food editor at the Forward. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @LifeDeathDinnerht

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.