The History of Cracker Jack

The history of how Cracker Jack came to be is one more annotation to the Great American Dream. In 1871, a German immigrant to the States, started making candied popcorn to sell to the workers who were cleaning up after the Great Chicago Fire of the same year. The infamous Cracker Jack mix was well on it’s way to corporate heaven. The enterprising Frederick W. Reuckheim later sent for his brother to come to America and join his growing candy making empire.

During the 1880’s, the brothers worked on making different candies to sell to the fire restoration workers in Chicago. Then, for the World’s Fair, the Reuckheim brothers combined peanuts, popcorn and a molasses mix for one of their staple candies. The majority of people who tried the hard candy complained of the overly hard structure, and the brothers got to work at making it less hard and more chewy.

The name “Cracker Jack” has a few historically unproven ways of coming into existence, but the most popular of the means was a customer who pronounced to the Reuckheim brothers that their peanut, popcorn and molasses confection was “Cracker, Jack!”, which was, at the time, a local slang term for something that was “very pleasing.

The brothers, liking the name at once, bought the trademark for the name “Cracker Jack” later that year. They also bought the trademark for their slogan later the same year, “The more you eat, the more you want”. Quite close to the “you can’t eat just one” potato chip slogan that would come along in about a hundred years.

In 1899, the brothers, along with newly acquired partner Henry Eckstein, stopped selling the confection in tubs, which was how is was packaged from the start. Mister Eckstein invented the waxed seal package that retains moisture, and is still used to this day. With the Cracker Jack now being sold in smaller boxes, worldwide distribution was only a heartbeat away, as so many people remembered it from the World’s Fair.

So, how did Cracker Jack become synonymous with baseball, instead of fires? It seems that the fire department would have been a much better target than baseball fans, what with the history of the historical confectionery. Vaudevillian singer and songwriter Jack Norworth, while sitting in a subway car, noticed an advertisement for a baseball game, and started writing the song that is still sung at every major league baseball game during the seventh inning stretch.

In 1910, coupons were added inside the box, to be redeemed for small prizes. In 1912, the brothers started adding a small prize to each package, and added the catch phrase “A prize in every package!”. During the harsh winter of 1918, during the great war, Fred’s grandson died of pneumonia at the tender young age of eight. His picture, dressed in his favourite sailor suit, was added to the Cracker Jack box, and the boxes were coloured red, white and blue to show their patriotism and to help in the war effort.

In 1922, the Bruckheim Bro’s and Norworth changed the name of their company to “The Cracker Jack Company”, which was bought by Frito-Lay in 1997, about 115 years after the confection was first introduced to the workers cleaning up after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Jack Norworth was given a Golden Ballpark Pass in 1958 by Major League Baseball (MLB) on the 50th anniversary of the “Take me out to the ball game” song, which gave him free access to any ballpark, for any MLB baseball game, for the remainder of his life.

Cracker Jacks and baseball, a story right out of the Great Depression and into the history books as part of the American Dream.