The father of the popular “Peeps” was 98 years old.
As reported by the New York Times, entrepreneur and inventor Bob Born died on January 28 at his home in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Known and loved in America as the creator of the “Peeps” shaped from marshmallow into cute and colorful chicks, Ira Brahm Born was born in Brooklyn in 1924 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. The father, Sam Born, had learned confectionery in France and introduced innovations such as a chocolate icing in the USA, which made popular products such as the “Klondike Bars” coated with a chocolate crust possible.
In the USA, Sam Born founded the company “Just Born Quality Confections”, which still exists today, in Brooklyn and relocated its headquarters to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1932. The son, who was called Bob from an early age, studied physics and initially wanted to become a doctor after serving on a destroyer in the Pacific, but after returning home he took a temporary job with the family business before beginning his medical studies. There, the challenges and creative possibilities captivated him in such a way that he stayed permanently.
Bob Born was particularly committed to the mass production of what was already a wide range of sweets at the time. He was particularly impressed by the “Peeps”, who ended up at “Just Born” through the takeover of a small rival company. The chicks made of sugar foam were only sold at Easter and were so laborious to make that the largely manual production process from mixing a mass of sugar, corn syrup and gelatine to packaging took 27 hours. Born and a colleague experimented for nine months and then found the key to simple mass production.
Now the product started a triumph that is quite unique in the USA. Peeps gradually came in all sorts of colors and varieties. Fans consumed the marshmallow chicks by the dozen, even hundreds, in competitions or staged scenarios of all kinds for competitions, such as those advertised by the Washington Post. In Pennsylvania at home, a “Peepsfest” celebrates the sweet icon, of which 5.5 million pieces roll off the assembly line within a few minutes every day (Link).
The father, Sam Born, was still able to witness the success and, according to his son, was “quite stunned”. Bob Born introduced other successful products and retired from day-to-day business after 1983, retiring in 1989. He then remained active as a philanthropist, for example on a program for the illiterate and in the dialogue of religions (Link).
