Junior Mints are a candy consisting of small rounds of mint filling inside a dark chocolate coating. Currently produced by Tootsie Roll Industries, the product is packaged in varying amounts from the fun-size box to the much larger 12.0 oz. box.

Junior Mints were introduced in 1949 by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based James O. Welch Company, manufacturers of candies and candy bars such as Sugar Babies, Welch's Fudge, Pom Poms and Milk Duds. Born in Hertford, North Carolina, Welch attended the University of North Carolina and then founded his Cambridge candy company in 1927.

His partner in the company was his brother, Robert W. Welch Jr., who retired from the confectionery business in 1956 and two years later founded the John Birch Society. The name of the product is a pun on Sally Benson's Junior Miss, a collection of her stories from The New Yorker, which were adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields into a successful play.

Directed by Moss Hart, Junior Miss ran on Broadway from 1941 to 1943. According to one past official company history, when James Welch developed and launched the product in 1949, he named the candy after his favorite Broadway show. Yet the candy came six years after the play had closed on Broadway.

Current copy on the Junior Mints box incorrectly gives the date of the Broadway play as 1949.

Similar to 0 things you like: