The Twin Bing is an Iowa icon, handmade in Sioux City for more than a century. What it isn’t, really, is a candy bar, even though the packaging says “candy bar” and it’s made by the Palmer Candy Company. Palmer was trying to break into America’s booming candy bar market when it introduced the first Bings in 1923.
By the time Milton Hershey started producing chocolate bars in 1900, the Palmers were already in the candy business. E.C. Palmer purchased a wholesale grocery business when he moved his family to Sioux City in 1878. In 1892, Palmer and his sons, Charles and William, added a wholesale fruit company. By 1898, the Palmers had expanded into candy manufacturing as well.
At the turn of the 20th century, candy was still being primarily sold by the box in drug stores or by the bag in candy stores. Hershey’s success showed there was a market for individually wrapped bars.
It was America’s entry into World War I in 1917 that really established Hershey’s innovation as a new norm, because the War Department included small chocolate bars as a part of a soldier’s rations.
In the early 1920s, a surge of new candy bars reached markets around the country and sales soared. The Palmers decided to join the sugar rush with their own round confection, which makers nicknamed “bumps.”
There’s no record of who invented the Bing, or who named it. According to Marty Palmer, the fifth generation of his family to run the Palmer Candy Company, no one even knows what the name means. But while its origins are a mystery, the Bing itself is pretty straightforward: A chewy, flavored nougat center is covered with a thick chocolate coating that has chopped roasted peanuts mixed into it.
Bings originally came in four flavors: pineapple, maple, vanilla and cherry. While the others fell by the wayside, cherry, with its cartoonishly vivid pink nougat center, remains the mainstay of the Bing world. Palmer’s does make other Bings — S’mores and Caramel Crunch — but it’s cherry people think of when they hear Twin Bing.
Bings became twinned in the 1960s. The price of candy was increasing as the cost of ingredients rose, and most manufacturers were reducing the sizes as they were raising prices. Palmer’s wanted to offer more Bing for the buck when it upped the price, but a bigger Bing would be a difficult fit for vending machines. So, two bumps were packaged together as twins. After “king-size” candy bars became a thing, Palmer’s introduced the King Bing, with three bumps instead of two.
The candy world changes, sometimes drastically. But in interviews last year for the 100th anniversary of the Bing, Marty Palmer said the cherry-flavored Bing isn’t changing as long as his family owns the company.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s 2024 Bread & Butter special issue.
