Behind Candy Wrapper Archive

In the beginning…

I have always been a candy lover and in the beginning I really never thought of myself as a collector of candy wrappers; just someone who saved them. I started saving candy wrappers in the summer of 1983, with a Whatchamacallit candy bar that my dad had bought me. I wasn’t into eating a lot of candy but I thought the name was cool and the wrapper was neat looking so I saved it. By the end of that summer I had flattened less than a dozen wrappers between the pages of a notebook. Off and on ever since then it’s been my habit to flatten wrappers. I mainly just ate the candy that I liked in mainly standard and king-sizes so my collection gets a little one sided. For a long time in the beginning I only ate candy when the wrapper design changed so I only ended up with one of each wrapper.

By 2008 my wrapper collection was by my estimate to be around 5,000 wrappers with duplicates and was in desperate need of cleaning and organizing. It was at about this time that I decided to go through the collection and catalog it as much as possible. Being a computer programmer I thought that if I had a searchable visual database it would be easier for me to find stuff. My goal quickly turned into putting them on the internet so others would have a chance to share in some good old childhood memories.