Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Tootsie Roll makes and sells candy, most famously the chewy chocolate Tootsie Roll, along with lollipops and other sweets.
Tootsie Roll is a candy company, and its name is also its most famous product: a chewy, chocolatey little log that has been sold for more than a century. People buy its candy at checkout counters, convenience stores, and big-box retailers, and the company makes money selling a lot of low-priced sweets in huge volumes. The flagship Tootsie Roll is joined by other well-known brands in the same corporate family, including Tootsie Pops (the lollipops with the chewy center) and Charms Blow Pops.
What makes this business interesting is how differently it runs from most public companies. The company is famously quiet and conservative, with a controlling family stake, and it has been run for decades by Ellen Gordon, who took over after her husband Melvin died in 2015. That continuity gives it a long-term, almost old-fashioned style: it owns its own factories, keeps debt low, and pays a steady dividend. Its candy is cheap to make and sell, and the brand names give it shelf space that generic candy struggles to get. Tootsie Roll does face real problems. Candy is a slow-growth business in the United States, where people have plenty of sweet options and health concerns keep nibbling at demand. Cocoa and sugar prices swing, and the company has raised prices at times to protect its margins. It also competes with much bigger players, including Hershey and Mars, though Mars is private, and it has generally grown through small acquisitions, like its 2023 purchase of the maker of Dot's Homestyle Pretzels, rather than through splashy new products.
Leo Hirshfield, an Austrian Jewish immigrant, worked at a small New York candy shop and wanted to make a chocolate-tasting candy that wouldn't melt in the heat and cost far less than real chocolate. He named it after his daughter Clara's nickname, Tootsie, and sold the hand-rolled candy for a penny. That cheap, sturdy little candy became the seed of everything that followed.
The company took a new name, The Sweets Company of America, and soon after listed its shares on the American Stock Exchange. A small candy shop was becoming a real public business.
The Tootsie Pop put a hard lollipop around a chewy Tootsie Roll center, and it took off during the Depression, when its low price made it a small treat even poor families could afford. The company now had a second hit on its hands.
By the mid-1930s the company was in serious trouble, and its main box supplier, Joseph Rubin & Sons, moved to take control to protect its biggest customer. Bernard D. Rubin bought up shares in person, became president, and fixed the business: a new formula, a bigger candy, a larger Hoboken plant. By his death in 1948, sales volume had grown twelvefold.
Control passed to William Rubin's daughter, Ellen Rubin Gordon, and for decades her husband Melvin Gordon served as chairman and CEO. The family that rescued the company would keep running it for generations.
The company adopted the name it still uses, Tootsie Roll Industries, and a couple of years later moved its headquarters to Chicago. The brand had become the company.
The company bought the Mason Division of The Candy Corporation of America, adding Mason Dots and Crows. It was the start of a long run of buying other candy brands, which would slowly turn a one-candy company into a collection of them.
Charms joined the Tootsie Roll family, and the deal made Tootsie Roll the largest producer of lollipops in the world. The little penny candy had grown into an industry leader.
Tootsie Roll bought Warner-Lambert's candy division for about $82 million, adding Junior Mints, Sugar Daddy, Sugar Babies and Charleston Chew, along with the Cambridge factory that still makes them. The company was now a home for famous brands that needed one.
The purchase of Concord Confections brought Dubble Bubble, Wack-o-Wax and vending candy into the fold. It was the last major brand acquisition in a run that had reshaped the company.
Melvin Gordon, who had run the company for more than 50 years, died at 95, the oldest CEO of a company listed on major U.S. exchanges. Ellen Gordon, already president, became CEO and chairwoman. The couple had long kept buyers away, and she had said many times the company was not for sale.
In early 2021, Tootsie Roll got swept up in the Reddit-driven meme-stock craze. The stock nearly doubled in a single day to a record high, briefly pushing the company's value above $4 billion, even though the pandemic had hurt sales. Nothing about the candy had changed; the market had simply gone wild.
Sales fell 6.3% for the fiscal year, to about $715 million, as high candy prices driven by soaring cocoa and chocolate costs hurt margins. Tootsie Roll began shifting its focus toward non-chocolate products in response.
Alongside early 2026 results, the company disclosed a multiyear plan to spend $75 million to $85 million expanding its plants. The goal is more capacity, better efficiency and meeting new customer demands, while investing in manufacturing to offset high cocoa and chocolate costs and protect the company's long-term value.
The company remains a profitable, cash-generating business with iconic brands, but it is not a growth story. It is the kind of company that quietly churns out candy, pays its shareholders, and keeps its head down — which is exactly how it has operated for generations.
Saved answer · last researched 3 Nov 2026