The boiled sweet first appeared in 1958 and quickly found its niche in the market for young consumers because it was a spherical sweet on a stick and therefore avoided the sticky mess that usually resulted from small fingers prizing a melting, sugary sweet from a traditional wrapper. As the popularity of the “sweet on a stick” began to grow, the original brand name, Chups, attracted the word Chupa (from the Spanish chupar – to suck or to lick) added by its young consumers and in advertising jingles. The name stuck and the sweets were re-branded in 1962 as Chupa Chups.

The founder of the business was a Barcelona confectioner by the name of Enric Bernat who was working in the family sweet factory in the 1950s. He raised the prospect of making sweet lollipops and promptly caused the walk-out of most of the enterprise’s investors. Bernat stuck to his guns, however, taking over the company in 1958, when he installed the production machines and began selling striped bonbons on wooden sticks for a peseta each.

Unusually heavy marketing (for the early 1960s) – including a spate of radio advertising jingles and the placement of the lollipops within the child’s easy reach near the cash register, instead of their traditional place on a shelf behind the counter – meant that Chupa Chups went from success to success. Within five years, Bernat’s sweets were on sale in 300,000 outlets and the wooden lolly sticks were replaced by plastic ones in response to a Spanish wood shortage. The company had to wait until the end of the Franco dictatorship, however, before turning its attention to the international markets. This it did with some vengeance during the 1970s, with the colorful lollipops appearing in South East Asian nations like Singapore and Malaysia. In the 1980s it expanded into the European and American markets, and in the 1990s to most Asian countries and the Australian market.

In 1995, a Chupa Chups lollipop was even flown up to the Mir space-station for one of the Russian cosmonauts (the sweets continue to market extraordinarily well in Russia). Chupa Chups ran a promotion featuring the Spice Girls with their Fantasy Ball Lollipops and Crazy Dips in 1997 & 1998. Madonna was also featured in one of the advertising campaigns.

With the falling birth rates of the 1980s and a dwindling market of youngsters in its native Spain, the company even resorted to an anti-smoking slogan Smoke Chupa Chups, in an effort to attract more adult consumers. The company was not slow to capitalize on footballing legend Johan Cruyff’s conversion from 20 cigarettes a day to a chain-sucking Chupa Chups coach at Barcelona Football Club in the early 1990s.

As it entered the 21^st century, the company was still a family-owned business, selling around 4 billion lollipops a year in 150 countries. The company had 2,000 employees, made 90 percent of its sales abroad, and achieved a turnover of some €500m.

By 2002 – Chupa Chups already having made billionaires of most of the Bernat family – the company was still actively looking to finance a series of planned acquisitions, especially those in the US (which had never been its strongest market, in competition with the reigning giant Tootsie Roll Industries). The initial plan was to float just a minority stake-holding in the company, yet even this was estimated to be worth as much as €2bn (or £1.25bn).

In the event, however, the entire Chupa Chups business was acquired by the European global manufacturer of confectionary and chewing gum, Perfetti Van Melle, in 2006. Billing itself as the third largest confectionery manufacturer in the world (after Cadbury and Wrigley), the company is the result of a merger in 2001 of Perfetti of Italy and Van Melle of the Netherlands (with corporate headquarters in both Lainate, Italy, and Breda, Holland). The company also owns a major subsidiary in the United States – Perfetti Van Melle, USA – in addition to several other large operations around the world.