Utah made snacks, and the ones that only feel local

The usual answers are an ice cream sandwich from Richmond, fruit bars on a stick from the same valley, salt water taffy, cheese curds that squeak, and a pink sauce for fries. Every item on that list but the sauce has a factory in Utah you can point to. The sauce has a folk history instead, which we get to below.

Two famous Utah names are missing here on purpose. Crumbl cookies and Swig's dirty sodas started in Logan and St. George, but both are shops, not packaged snacks, and the story of each is in famous brands from Utah.

Yes. Casper's Ice Cream makes them in Richmond, a small town in Cache Valley near the Idaho line. The company's history says that in 1925 Casper Merrill took milk and cream from his family's cows and made what it calls the original ice cream nut sundae, first sold as the Casco Nut Sundae. He made the first frozen treats in a ten-gallon milk can and sold them at the local Fourth of July celebration. The FatBoy sandwich came after, and in 2020 the vanilla one was still the top seller.

Casper's says it has used vat pasteurization for its whole 95-year history, and in 2020 Dairy Foods^2,3 reported that it was headquartered in Richmond. One honest note on ownership: MidOcean Partners, a New York private equity firm, bought Casper's in January 2022. The sandwiches still come from Richmond, and the company's history says the original ingredients and recipe have changed very little.

Yes, and they started with a request from a school principal. According to the Utah's Own listing for Creamies, a Cache Valley grade school principal asked Richard Merrill in the late 1950s for a frozen treat made with milk instead of sugar water. The result was a reduced fat ice cream bar with real fruit in it, and the original Creamie is still made in Cache Valley.

The company behind it today is Heart to Heart Foods in Hyde Park, just north of Logan. In a profile on the Utah State University Western Dairy Center's site, the bars are submerged in water at 35 degrees below zero and then "stabbed with an army of 10,000 wooden sticks." The company sells about 15 million of the original Creamies a year.

Both of these taffy makers have been at it for more than a century.

Taffy Town began as the Glade Candy Company in 1916 and changed its name in the 1990s. Its taffy is whipped with egg whites instead of pulled, which the company describes as the thing that separates it from other taffy makers. The West Jordan factory runs more than 90 flavors and sells them at a store on Prosperity Road, open Monday through Thursday from 9 to 5 and Friday mornings until 1.

Older still, and not born here, is Sweet Candy Company. Leon Sweet started it in Portland, Oregon, in 1892 and moved it to Salt Lake City in 1900. Since 1999 it has made its candy in a 180,000 square foot plant near the airport, and it calls itself family-owned and operated. It lists more than 250 candy items, gummy bears and sours among them. Don't plan a visit. The company says public tours and its factory store have been permanently discontinued.

The savory side of the list is younger and a lot more European.

Edwin Gossner, who came to the United States from Switzerland in 1930, incorporated Gossner Foods in Logan in 1966. The company says it now makes about 20 percent of the Swiss cheese made in America. A Utah.com guide to Cache Valley food calls Gossner⁸ known for its squeaky cheese curds: "it really does squeak when you chew it." That is the entire review, and it is enough.

Creminelli Fine Meats was founded in Salt Lake City in 2007 by Cristiano Creminelli, Chris Bowler and Jared Lynch. The founders chose Utah because its dry climate is similar to that of northern Italy, where the Creminelli¹² family has cured meat for generations. The snack version is Salami Minis, which the company lists at 19 grams of protein and no sugar per pack, and Creminelli has been sold in more than 8,000 Starbucks stores across North America. A coffee chain from Seattle sells a salami cured in Salt Lake City.

Nobody has proved it. Fry sauce, roughly equal parts ketchup and mayonnaise, is claimed by Utah with total confidence and very little paperwork. KUER¹³ spoke with food historian Michael Christensen, who laid out the competing stories. Some credit Don Carlos Edwards, Arctic Circle's founder, in Ogden in the 1940s. Others point to Stan's Drive-in in Provo, which displays a plaque claiming the original, or to a traveling salesman from Iowa. KUER also pointed to a mayonnaise and ketchup sauce in a 1900 New Orleans cookbook, and to German and Argentine cousins.

At least one Utah company has tried bottling it. In 2010 Stephen's Gourmet, a Farmington hot cocoa brand, launched Stephen's Gourmet Fry Sauce. A cocoa company making fry sauce is about as Utah as a business decision gets.

A few makers still sell at the door. Taffy Town's West Jordan store keeps the weekday hours above. The Logan and Cache Valley page maps the dairy side of this list, and Utah brands you can visit covers factory stores across the state.

If the person you are shopping for lives somewhere else, leave the frozen snacks for their next visit. The candy and the salami travel, and Utah food gifts that ship sorts out who sends what and on which days. The rest of the makers are on the food and drink page.