The Snap Test

Around nineteen twenty, a man named Henry Kessler founded the York Cone Company Corporation on South Pine Street. The company started making ice cream cones and waffles, then Kessler decided he wanted to make candy. He wanted something specific: a chocolate mint confection that was firm rather than gooey, that would hold its shape in warm weather and carry a clean, sharp peppermint flavor.

What he eventually produced was the York Peppermint Pattie. The candy had a rule attached to it from the beginning. It was called the snap test.

A pattie that didn't break cleanly in half when bent was not sold. The snap was the quality standard, a tactile proof that the mint center had set correctly and the chocolate coating had cured to the right consistency. York Cone trademarked the name in nineteen forty-nine, citing a first commercial use date of nineteen twenty-two, though the pattie as most people know it today is commonly dated to nineteen forty.

For decades the candy remained a regional product, sold primarily in Pennsylvania and surrounding states. In nineteen seventy-two, the York Cone Company was acquired by Peter Paul, the maker of Almond Joy and Mounds, and three years later the pattie went national. In nineteen eighty-eight, Hershey acquired the brand as part of a larger purchase of Cadbury Schweppes' American confectionery operations, and it has been a Hershey product ever since.

The original factory is long gone. But the snap test, and the name of the city on the wrapper, persisted across every ownership change.