Who is this Pravin Pant Sr. person listed on Wikipedia as the person who introduced mass market Peeps in 1958?
Pravin Pant Sr. Ha! I saw that posted on Wikipedia and it’s totally not true. Someone made it up, and it was sort of too funny for me to correct. I need to know: who invented Peeps? Peeps were originally hand squeezed out of pastry tubes from a very small operation by the Rodda Candy Company of Lancaster, PA. They were just a small, local, Pennylvania candy at first. Then Samuel Born came along; he was a Russian immigrant who had his own little chocolate candy company called Just Born. What’s funny about the story is that Born acquired the Rodda Candy Company to get their jelly bean technology. The marshmallow chicks they made were just an aside at first. But ultimately Sam’s father invented a machine that could mass-produce Peeps, and now here we are today: 800 million Peeps are made just for Easter. It’s 1.4 billion Peeps, year-round, if you include all the shapes. The production line, from Power of the Peep Those assorted shapes are seasonal, like Jack-o-Lantern Peeps for Halloween.
